The WAN Show - It's Time To Name And Shame - WAN Show June 2, 2023

Starting point is 00:00:00 welcome to the WAN show which is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster today based on how the setup has gone and the fact that there is uh i mean we can't deny what's here in between us today didn't notice that but we're starting the anyway. We have got a great show lined up for you guys. The big topics are, I have finally been convinced to name and shame the pool company, landscaping company that I've been using. And I'm going to be talking about, you know, why whole room water cooling, the second, has been delayed. And it basically comes down to, I don't want to end up slandering anyone. So it basically comes down to, in my opinion, the way that they've handled the job.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Allegedly. I also want to talk about why there's been almost no gaming hardware news in our LTT coverage of Computex. That was not an accident, but it also wasn't something I can avoid. And so I'll explain that in a little bit more detail later. What else we got today? The Dolphin Steam launch has been postponed, probably indefinitely, but we'll dive into that later. And also, speaking of no gaming news nvidia

Starting point is 00:01:25 maybe temporarily joined the one trillion dollar club one trillion dollars and they definitely did not get there through gaming gpus take that gamers i just realized i have absolutely no way of rolling the intro yeah dan's Dan's going to have to hit it. Sick. Hey. Oh, my God. Thank you. It's been so long since we've done a WAN show on site like this. It's the Thai WAN show guys and I'm absolutely here for it.

Starting point is 00:02:20 Someone pointed out in the flow plane chat that this is actually just a Star Forge logo. Yes. So it's okay it's a hammer yeah yeah yeah it's a hammer it's a hammer it's right between our heads i am so sore right now and so tired guys as tired as i look that's how tired i am i've actually spent more time playing badminton than actually like i think we got if we if we collected the amount of hours we slept last night we had one full night of sleep yeah yeah it was pretty it was pretty rough i played for like five hours yesterday and this is really bad i i realized when i got a group chat this morning from the center back home that I'm actually signed up to play

Starting point is 00:03:08 badminton on Saturday again. Which is tonight. Which is tonight, but also I go back in time when I go home, so it's like far from now tonight, but I have played every day. Do you think you're going to crush when you go home, even

Starting point is 00:03:24 though you're sore, because you go home even though you're sore because you're like so warmed up against good players um you saw me try to go downstairs last yeah but i saw you try to go downstairs the night before as well yeah and then you found a way to play yeah so i got injured on the first day um if you see played through it i still played every day. So what would happen was I would heal a little bit at night, and then I would spend the day walking around the show floor, like hobbling around the show floor. I fake it pretty well on camera.

Starting point is 00:04:01 So anything other than the Gigabyte booth coverage and the, what was it systems i'm like uh and uh so if you look at if you look closely at the montage of me running when we did the video in the uh super micro booth where we had to like go on a fetch quest to get a replacement cpu and ram for this blade server. If you look closely, I am like heavily limping in that video. So I would hobble around the show floor and then I would go play badminton, injure myself to the point of barely being able to lift my leg out of an Uber

Starting point is 00:04:38 to get out of it. And then I would do rinse and repeat the entire trip here. I've actually had a lot of fun it's been really great it's been so long since i've been in the thick of things and you know what it's funny because i've been seeing a lot of comments from people that are like yeah linus seems better he seems like he's having fun or he seems like he's, he's chilled out or he seems like whatever, you know, if the content's going to be like this, when the new CEO comes in, I'm here for it. And at first I was like, that seems stupid. Uh, no offense because,

Starting point is 00:05:17 you know, one of the videos that had a lot of comments like that was actually the hundred thousand dollar minecraft pc build for carl jacobs we shot that video like three months ago yeah yeah i saw a bunch of videos about that on our cleaning video as well i was like hmm uh comments about that but yes yeah um he said he saw a lot of videos about it yeah he's tired too we both went out for beef noodle soup at like 2 30 in the morning last night because that's a smart thing to do who's worried that it's good soup it was really good soup yeah um anyway at first i was thinking to myself okay these guys are just looking for something but i gotta say i i felt creatively liberated at the show this year. I didn't feel like I had to just do traditional booth coverage.

Starting point is 00:06:09 And honestly, I didn't want to because I could have uploaded the same thing we would have uploaded at Computex four years ago. But I feel like the channel's come a long way since then. I feel like the community expectations have come a long way since then. And I feel like the industry has changed a lot since then. I will talk about the pool thing. I know that's our headline topic, but I actually want to talk about this other topic first. And this was almost going to be a rainwalk video.

Starting point is 00:06:38 I might still write it up and shoot it before we leave, but I want to talk through some of the thoughts that I had just here on the wan show because you guys probably noticed right we shot almost nothing this year in in terms of pc gaming like for the ltt channel i mean noctua had has that really cool offset mounting bar thing so you so you can drop your temperatures a little bit on AM5 CPUs by actually moving the cooler down to where the CCDs are under the IHS. And other than that, our first video was NVIDIA's Grace Superchip and Grace Hopper data center our second video is for systems cooling which okay if this matures the way that they think they can wow it's going to be an absolute game changer for gaming

Starting point is 00:07:39 laptops yeah but if the view rates on laptop videos are anything to go by from you guys i'm i'm thinking you mostly care about desktops and i just i i don't see this technology making its way into the desktop in any yeah maybe a realistic amount of time like just from a cost perspective it won't make sense because you don't need the benefits. You don't need the size benefit. So why are you paying for it? Right. Um, the Noctua cooler. Oh, right. Then super micro super micro was one of the other really interesting things at the show. Uh, these, these micro blade servers, did you watch this video? No. Okay. These are super cool because instead of using server CPUs, they're just Ryzens. And so instead of going multi-socket, they're just blades with full Ryzen PCs.

Starting point is 00:08:32 So it's a 3U rack with eight full computers in it. And you can put up to Ryzen 7950X 3Ds. So if you wanted to do a high-performance game server, like top-tier single-th single threaded performance, this is it. And you can still, you know, slice them up and virtualize them because, you know, it just occurred to me. I don't think we're grateful enough that virtualization for, this would be a really interesting thing to dig into in a tech quickie or something like that. How did we end up with proper virtualization support on the desktop it is kind of surprised that hasn't been a gated feature at some point well i think it was at some point oh i think in

Starting point is 00:09:15 the early days it was like i'm trying to think like sriov i don't think was something that even if it was supported by the CPUs, I think motherboard manufacturers weren't implementing it into their BIOSes. I know ILMMU is something that has matured a lot over the last 10 years. Okay, so it's been a minute, but yeah, like Intel Core 2 Duo

Starting point is 00:09:37 apparently had some issues. Okay, yeah. Virtualization being locked off. Yeah, so there you go. The fact that we ended up with that is kind of a miracle when you look at the way that it didn't happen with gpus um and to be clear there has been stuff at the show this year that is gamer focused i mean uh we've got a short that i shot for short circuit on asus's

Starting point is 00:09:59 concept gpu that moves the 12 volt power off of the top. So there's no cable and it's just got a finger on the bottom. But I feel like a lot of noise was made about how innovative that was from people who don't cover Mac. Because when Apple launched the latest cheese grater Mac Pro, that's exactly how they did the power

Starting point is 00:10:21 for the GPUs in it. And it supported cables. So it had female connectors on the motherboard and you could buy a cable kit. So you could plug like a non first party GPU into it and you could, you could power it that way, but it just had a slot X extended slot at the back and you plugged it in like that. And that was how it was powered. And I'm sitting here going like, I mean, is that really, is that really gaming news then a couple brands showed off even bigger 4090s sweet that's what we need nice all right so cooler master did and then this wasn't in our computex roundup here it's not in our notes but um asus also did when i popped by they they have a mock-up of a noctua edition cooler that has 140 millimeter fans on it

Starting point is 00:11:15 noctua's new 140 millimeter fans so it probably performs like a hot damn but it is absolutely colossal we're gonna have a tweet going up with just like your classic i'm holding a regular size gpu and i'm holding that when you versus the guy she tells you not to worry about you know that um intel showed nothing for a consumer desktop yeah amd showed nothing for consumer desktop nvidia showed nothing for consumer desktop when was the last time that that happened? At Computex. At Computex. Yeah. Yeah, that's rough.

Starting point is 00:12:09 And not even Consumer Desktop. I mean, we're not even seeing, we're not even seeing, there's hints, there's hints that there's a new Threadripper coming, but is it going to be a Threadripper for enthusiasts or is it going to be Threadripper Pro, which is priced for professionals and is not really going to be Threadripper Pro which is priced for professionals

Starting point is 00:12:26 and is not really going to be applicable to gamers at all anyway because the motherboards are going to cost $1,300 like we've seen with the current Threadripper Pros. Curious Brad says, I'm so sick of NVIDIA this, NVIDIA that. I want to see the competition rise up. You've got to

Starting point is 00:12:44 give credit to NVID though they they just keep kind of they keep kind of killing it i guess i'll also throw a shout out to intel they're trying yeah yeah they're trying on it those price cuts recently are actually like really compelling yeah 199 for an a750 yeah like that's actually crazy i know it only has eight gigs of vram guys but like it's 200 yeah like that that's freaking awesome it's actually wild competition's back but it seems to be between intel and amd yeah at the low end yeah because i mean nvidia comes in with the 4060. Okay, we're going to talk about NVIDIA in more detail later. But, you know, first I want to talk about, you know,

Starting point is 00:13:31 this kind of this topic that I wanted to discuss, which is like PC gaming's kind of in trouble. Is it PC gaming or is it pc gaming hardware enthusiasts well i think it's a little bit of i think it's a little bit of both right because there's a lot of excitement for you know higher fidelity graphics for example and for you know game design that pushes the envelope and you know whether that's in-game physics or whether it's you know much larger scale multiplayer or whether it's like there's lots of different things that are not just more eye candy yeah faster gpu right and one of the observations that i made at the show is that a lot of the really exciting stuff that's happening right now is in the data center and

Starting point is 00:14:34 more worrying that data center tech is not the kind of thing that i am expecting to trickle down to gamers in a meaningful way and so i want to kind of explain what I mean by that. In the past, we saw innovation, like there's always been this, I shouldn't say always been, but there has traditionally been this trickle down. So when multi-core was a big push in the data center, you know, back, especially when software was licensed per socket right all of a sudden there was this push to have more and more cores per socket right and then when performance per watt was a big push in the data center all of a sudden we saw efficiency gaming brands talking

Starting point is 00:15:20 about how important efficiency was for your new gaming cpu has been great because power prices in a lot of places around the world are like through the absolute roof right now. But right now, what we're talking about is accelerators. We're talking about, I mean, AMD launched that really cool looking video encoding accelerator. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When talking about things like AI accelerators and whatnot, though, I do think that's actually going to trickle down.

Starting point is 00:15:45 Because we're talking about things like, okay, not in the gaming space, but there's that talk recently about the generative AI that's in Photoshop. Yes. That's actually pretty big. And then I do believe there's going to be games that like, you know, procedurally generated game styles, where it's procedurally generated through AI accelerated tasks. game styles where it's procedurally generated through AI accelerated tasks. But tell me this, will that AI make its way to your local processing in a meaningful way? Or will that generative AI be done in,

Starting point is 00:16:15 on a, in a cloud server somewhere? I actually genuinely think it's going to be both. You think it will be both? Because I think there's going to be single player games that have procedural generation built into it and they can use your local processing to do it how are the games rating organizations going to rate a game that has real-time generated content in it especially with ai's ability to just like screw up yeahinate, just do the wrong thing. Because you can put like bumpers, but it can also just go around it or find alternatives. So that's going to be interesting.

Starting point is 00:16:51 All right. Well, you're getting ahead of me a little bit here, but I was going to point out that some of the things that we're seeing in the data center space right now are just plain not beneficial to consumers. PCIe Gen 5. This is going to be kind of an unpopular take I think. But I fully support that both Nvidia and AMD and actually I guess Intel for that matter all delivered their latest gen GPUs with PCIe Gen 4. We clearly, obviously, do not need double the PCIe bandwidth for our gaming GPUs. And then, you know, storage. Storage is another area where brands are pushing PCIe Gen 5 really hard. But we've shown, and other publications have shown time and time again,

Starting point is 00:17:41 that the benefit to PCIe Gen 5, to faster storage in general for gamers, is basically nothing. Now, could that change? And then, right, the last point I was going to make is that it's all about accelerators now. So whether it's video encoding accelerators from AMD, or whether it's AI accelerators, or whether it's, you know, oh, like network accelerators. NVIDIA was really excited about this network accelerator they were showing off that has a 16-core CPU on it or something like that. Yeah, there were comments on the video, like, NVIDIA's new network card has more compute cores on it than my entire household, you know. And it's really cool technology but we look at how long gigabit was the standard for consumers and I'm sitting here going is encrypting your network is offloading

Starting point is 00:18:38 network traffic encryption really gonna be something we're gonna see on a desktop computer in the next 10 years 15 20? 20? It's hard to look that far ahead, but I kind of doubt it. And so I'm looking at all these innovations. So PCIe Gen 5, even in the data center, a big part of it is simplifying board layouts and making them more economical. So taking an SSD and giving it two lanes of Gen 5 instead of four lanes of Gen 4 and getting that same bandwidth. And I think we're going to continue to see that moving into Gen 6. And so we may not even see consumer platforms adopt Gen 6 just over the power consumption limitations. Or we might see them use Gen 6, but just use fewer lanes for everything as opposed to actually making

Starting point is 00:19:26 things faster. Now, where I wanted to kind of pivot the conversation is to talk about and speculate how we could see these technologies being beneficial to consumers. I mean, one area where faster storage is supposed to help, right, is direct storage. Yeah. But we've seen a couple of direct storage games, and it hasn't really made a difference. No. So what's the deal with that?

Starting point is 00:19:57 Is it just that these games were not developed start to finish enough around fast storage hardware. Yeah, I think there's also the early adopter thing. You know when a console first comes out? Look at Tears of the Kingdom versus the first one, Breath of the Wild. There was pretty significant improvements that happened there as far as my understanding goes,

Starting point is 00:20:20 if you actually happen to play it on a Switch instead of emulating it. kind of goes if you actually happen to play it on a Switch instead of emulating it. But they're going to get better at using it over time, but there also needs to be incentives for these devs to have to work harder to actually do that. There's conversations going around recently about how developing for the Switch

Starting point is 00:20:42 is where you're seeing pretty much all of the effort going into being efficient with things. You can see PC games coming out there like 140 gigs. Yeah. It's just like, oh, okay. So they did it. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see it happen. Okay, what else could we use faster storage for?

Starting point is 00:21:01 I mean, that's always been something that's been kind of baffling to me you know when i'm uh you know performing some some simple operation my cpu is sitting at four percent usage my ram's barely touched and my supposedly you know seven gigabyte a second ssd is pinned at a at a hundred percent and like i'm not even doing i'm not even doing that much. Realistically, it's the limitation always just going to be the controllers and the NAND flash as opposed to the pipes to them. But let's say they can build faster flash and we reduce that bottleneck. What would we do with faster storage?

Starting point is 00:21:38 So direct storage theoretically would allow us to do PS5-type things where you're streaming game data directly off of the ssd um like streaming textures um i'd like to see i'd like to see an xbox like resume but not just from suspend from like hibernate is there any reason god is well no think about it no i love the concept i just windows and sleeping. I know. But look. Great concept though. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:11 No, we're having, we're thinking optimistically today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great. Turn off that pessimistic, cynical brain of yours and think of what we could do with faster storage. Hit me guys. I do like that a lot. Being able to sleep your computer in the middle of heavy tasks like gaming or potentially whatever else and come back to it and have it actually resume in the

Starting point is 00:22:32 middle of it would be would be cool fire simulations guys um i mean i guess yeah there's not there's not we could store things faster what a comment amazing oh discussion question handyman over on floatplane chat asks have I buried the hatchet with Jensen from

Starting point is 00:23:00 Nvidia I actually do have an update on that so I can talk about that a little bit but i'm worried i think you're right i think ai ai games are are gonna be they're gonna have a moment and then they're gonna go away because they kind of sucked oh yeah they're all gonna be really bad and we're going to find ways to implement it into handcrafted games. And it's going to end up being, I suspect the early ones,

Starting point is 00:23:32 it's going to be like a selling feature of the game. Yes. It's going to be like CGI and movies. Yeah. Right. Where it starts out as doing CGI for the sake of doing CGI. Yeah. And then it turns into, you know, Wolf of Wall Street.

Starting point is 00:23:53 Have you ever seen the side-by-side of Wolf of Wall Street shots before and after CGI? Watching the movie, you wouldn't even know. Yeah. I wouldn't have thought there was any. CGI heavy this film is. Wow. But there's like this, there's this helicopter shot of his beach house. And other than the house itself, like the surrounding area looks nothing like the original shot. They just, and there's this doorway that he walks through. And it's on a basically completely different building. And I'm just looking at it going, was that necessary? Was that really necessary? But,

Starting point is 00:24:22 but it was integrated in such a way that I didn't notice it. I wouldn't have noticed at all. And so if that was the director's vision, then great. Yeah, like I suspect there's going to be some AI procedurally generated dungeon crawler, which exists purely because it is what I just said. Well, it's funny that you say that because the procedurally generated levels were a major selling point of diablo 1 yeah um and so we might see better that but it's going to be worse in certain ways oh yeah almost certainly it will be worse in certain ways it's like going to generate something that like the the word for it is similar to

Starting point is 00:25:04 something else so it ends up spitting out the wrong thing and all this other problems are gonna happen but yeah i think we're gonna go too far at first and then it'll fall back and then when it starts to come back and properly i think it'll be in ways that you don't necessarily notice a ton but yeah so honestly with that timeline I think we're like pretty significantly far out. And I guess that transitions us pretty perfectly to talking a little bit more in detail about NVIDIA and what's been going on with them lately. NVIDIA joined the $1 trillion valuation Big Boys Club.

Starting point is 00:25:42 Sorry, gamers. And I alluded to this earlier, right on the heels of their launch of the rtx 4060 where gamers were up in arms uh gaming media is up in arms over how uh you know awful the 4060 is from a competitive standpoint how awful it is is from a last gen to current gen upgrade standpoint. And then their stock jumps, you know, 25% the following day, they briefly hit a $1 trillion valuation. This is alongside Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Saudi Aramco, which I don't know how to pronounce, but there you go, oil company. They're the first chip maker to touch the one trillion mark

Starting point is 00:26:31 thanks to massive demand for AI processors. That is what it is all about. I think you nailed it. I think it was last WAN show when you were saying, like, I think they're not being price competitive on this GPU because they just didn't dedicate a lot of, like, manufacturing to it. Like, I think that's it. I think why're not being price competitive on this GPU because they just didn't dedicate a lot of manufacturing to it. I think that's it. I think why be price competitive when we don't even have a ton of them

Starting point is 00:26:51 because we want those lines to be dedicated towards other things. Here's the thing. I don't know if I was right anymore. I think it's a combination of things. They went to an aggressive new process node that is more expensive and does have lower yields compared to what AMD is able to do with their lower end cards. 7600 was the most recent one. And I had a meeting with Nvidia at the show that I guess I should talk about, right? I don't know if any of it was on the record, so hopefully this is all kosher, but anywho.

Starting point is 00:27:26 Basically, here's what I think, and this is not anything that anyone at NVIDIA said. This is just what I think from talking to some of the NVIDIA folks, from seeing what's going on with them on a business level, I think they should split up i think they should spin off geforce interesting because talking to the folks at nvidia who do work on the geforce team looking at the kinds of unnecessary innovations that they are still bringing to gaming uh so they announced uh a new ultra low motion blur technology that they are still bringing to gaming so they announced a new ultra low motion blur

Starting point is 00:28:07 Technology that they've announced a few things. Yeah. Yeah that they they claim gets to something. I think there's like 1600 Hertz motion clarity or something like that it feels It feels very Because we can make it a little bit better, you know? And, and that's especially true to me because we have display technologies coming down the pipe that are going to make that level of better image persistence on LCD totally unnecessary. Right. And so I'm looking at it going, And so I'm looking at it going, yeah, these guys in the lab are really trying to crush it here for gamers. And in some ways, I feel like they're kind of getting held back by the expectations that NVIDIA, the organization's shareholders have for profitability. Because GeForce is always going to be a consumer brand

Starting point is 00:29:07 with consumer margins, right? Whereas NVIDIA's data center business or their AI business for automotive, right? Or their embedded products business, like all of these, anything that's B2B is inherently going to have more margin because your customer is making money on it. Like a new GPU is a burden because all of a sudden there's all these new games

Starting point is 00:29:38 that you couldn't play before that now it's time to buy and play. And I don't mean a burden personally. I mean a financial burden, right? You're not, outside of mining, you're not making money on it. But that's a really important point to make because mining is such a great example of how when something makes you money,

Starting point is 00:30:00 all of a sudden, even if you are an actual gamer, you're willing to pay so much more for it because it helps offset the cost. Right? So the kinds of margins that NVIDIA can make on something like a gray super chip are going to look really attractive to their shareholders. And the kinds of margins they can make on some RTX 4060, even if it seems completely unreasonable to you and to me, are going to look really unattractive. And as the proportion of this business shrinks on the gaming side and grows on the data center side, their shareholders are going to look at them and go, hey guys, what are you doing?

Starting point is 00:30:44 So, hey, guys, what are you doing? Yeah. Should you even be making consumer GPUs anymore or shipping all the silicon, all the wafers you can get from TSMC or Intel, for that matter? That's going to be interesting. Jensen said their next-gen manufacturing node is looking good. Should you just be booking all of it for AI and completely ignoring gaming?

Starting point is 00:31:05 And I don't think NVIDIA wants to. That's what I wanted to say is I think the GeForce team really wants to build great gaming experiences. And I feel like they're a little bit hamstrung right now. I have for quite a while now. I assume you've kind of felt the same thing. You know, when you used to go to Nvidia.com and the like main thing was drivers? GeForce drivers specifically. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:29 Now, like even if you go to geforce.com, which just redirects to nvidia.com slash GeForce, there's like the GeForce section, but then there's another banner above that. Just like making sure that you don't forget that there's a separation between GeForce and NVIDIA, and you can go to the main menu of NVIDIA.com, which has nothing to do with GeForce. Even when you're on the specific GeForce page, they're like, just in case you didn't mean to

Starting point is 00:31:55 be here, we've got you. Products, solutions, industries. For you, whatever that means. Yeah. I have always felt kind of weird about the Nvidia site for a while now and of that reason and this really ties Into what I was talking about before Where it used to be that the innovations that Nvidia would build for their data center products would benefit Gamers would make their way down to gamers. Yeah, but we've actually seen over actually Wow I guess the last couple of generations, Volta was an example of an NVIDIA chip that was built specifically not for gamers.

Starting point is 00:32:36 And then Hopper, as far as I can tell, is simply not for gamers at all. It just doesn't have functional units you need for gaming because it's laser focused on AI, right? And so we're not going to necessarily benefit from that R&D money that comes from enterprise customers and goes towards building a bigger, better GPU that ultimately gamers also get to kind of tag along with right and so i yeah i i i would i don't know if i would like to see it but i think it makes sense i think it

Starting point is 00:33:17 could make sense for nvidia to just say yeah this is a spin-off business it's geforce they they sort of they they they buy innovation from nvidia essentially they're they're a customer of nvidia uh in the same way that uh a nintendo would be a customer of nvidia for the processor and the switch and the geforce team is laser focused on building great drivers, building great technologies to leverage the hardware from NVIDIA. Obviously, they'd work very close together, but then they wouldn't have the burden of needing to make those same margins and they could get scrappier. And they could take the fight to AMD.

Starting point is 00:34:01 And as Intel ramps up with Battle mage and celestial their upcoming architectures i think they could be more competitive because at the end of the day right every fan boy has gotta understand you don't want one to win yeah yeah ever that's not good. Whether we're talking the big three, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, every single one of them has shown again and again and again that in the absence of competition, I'm very tired. In the absence of competition, the first thing they'll do is stop refreshing products and ramp up the price.

Starting point is 00:34:50 Let's look for recent examples from each one. Shall we play a game? Sure. Do you want to go first or shall I go first? Intel pre-AMD's resurgence in the like, what would that have been? Like five, 6,000 series range? Well, this number, this number is key.

Starting point is 00:35:11 Four? Four. Okay. How many cores did you get? Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, four cores forever was, that was a very long term thing. That ought to be all anyone needs, Luke.

Starting point is 00:35:24 Yeah, that's good enough. Yeah, that's a perfect example. And then if we look to AMD, the second Intel didn't have an HEDT, a high-end desktop competitor. AMD simply stopped bothering releasing new Threadrippers, regardless of the commitments that they had already made, not just to their

Starting point is 00:35:45 enthusiast and gamer customers, but to buyers of the STRX40 or whatever it was called, their last socket, their Ryzen 3000 Threadripper socket. They were just like, They were just like, eh. It was basically done. There were samples out there. They just decided, yeah. Why bother? Threadripper Pro is more profitable.

Starting point is 00:36:13 So why bother? This is why for years as we've been rooting for AMD to push really hard, we've also been pointing out that they're not like, you know, the like magically benevolent good guys. There was that campaign that they ran a while ago where they had people with like, uh, protest signs at packs and stuff. Do you remember that?

Starting point is 00:36:32 No. Oh man. I don't think I saw that. It sounds cringe. I don't remember the name of the campaign. Sounds cringe. Uh, it was like resist,

Starting point is 00:36:43 like resist AMDs or resist Intel'sels whatever i wonder if i can find it i think it's probably been like too long and looking up anything that has to do with protest is just going to come up with a lot of news articles so i think i don't think i'm going to find it but yeah at like pax west back in the day, I remember there being genuine paid actors with protest signs that had resist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was all AMD branding. And it was all about buy AMD to resist Intel. It's like, yeah, you guys would do the same thing.

Starting point is 00:37:21 Yep. I do want you to do better because competition is good but yeah okay so then the last one is nvidia nvidia i honestly feel like hasn't sat on their laurels as much in a technological sense as the other brands but they have definitely taken advantage of what they can extract cost-wise yeah much as possible yep i mean with them in some ways they're just kind of smarter about it because they're definitely doing it and we talked about this when we did our tier list for the best geforce gpus which by the way i know i often ask you have you watched the video i I know the answer is no. You should watch this one. I skipped through and watched the 8,000 series because I cared about that.

Starting point is 00:38:09 You know how many people did that? Was it a lot? Well, not the 8,000 series specifically, but the retention chart on that video is super weird. We actually had a debate internally before we started working on it for when we should start because we didn't start at the beginning and we could have because the there were only a few generations of geforce gpus before the starting point and we didn't start later so it was actually pitched to me that we start more um like like way way more recently i forget i forget what the what the push was but way more recently and and do do far fewer of them and i picked fx and i forget why i think the rationale that i provided was it was right it was the first direct

Starting point is 00:39:08 x9 gpu and i think this is just my own personal biases because for me pc gaming really started to get you know visually really good looking with direct x9 and looking back at it I think it was just my own personal that's when I got into gaming and so we see that in the retention graph for this video how many people got into gaming with 900 series and 10 series yeah basically everything earlier is like skip skip skip skip oh what about this one that i bought that i'm really passionate about or that's still in my gaming rig right now and i love this thing i've been using it for years isn't that hilarious just how few people care wild these spikes are so wow yeah really extreme i've never seen anything quite like this.

Starting point is 00:40:05 That's very interesting. Yeah, it's really cool. Anywho, what was I talking about again? Right. So with NVIDIA, it's been more of a slow boil. And we talked about it a fair bit here, where starting with the 600 series, this history is really important to understand when you look at NVIDIA's pricing strategy and you want to kind of get a better idea of

Starting point is 00:40:26 Where they're going in the future so starting with 600 series and okay Nvidia has code names for their GPUs and I hate that the word GPU has come to mean graphics card because they are not the same thing a GPU is a graphics processing unit and it's a chip. A graphics card is a board that contains a GPU, VRAM, power delivery, display outputs, okay? So the GPUs, they have code names for these, and typically they will have a letter to indicate the architecture

Starting point is 00:41:07 like GK would be G force Kepler or GA would be G force Ampere. Okay. So they have a letter and then they have a number and that number, the final digit, the lower that digit is so if it's a zero that is going to be the largest chip for that series if it's a two that's going to be a smaller one if it's a four smaller six smaller i'm trying to remember how high they've gone in the past but the point is the higher that number goes the smaller the actual die is so sometimes you'll see two GeForce GPUs that have, let's say one has 5,000 CUDA cores and one has 4,000. But if you dig into the tech power-up GPU database or something like that,

Starting point is 00:41:55 you'll find that they're both using the same chip. Well, some of those functional units might have been, some of those CUDA cores might have been damaged in manufacturing or they might have just been turned off to hit a lower power profile or to create segmentation between two products so that this one doesn't perform too close to the other one. different dyes because there's only so many CUDA cores on a dye, even if it's perfect. And it only makes so much sense to cut them down before that's just a broken product. And the power profile wouldn't make any sense for this, you know, more budget oriented product. So that's why you design these different sizes of dyes. Finally getting there, um, with Kepler, that was the first time we saw NVIDIA launch a flagship 80 series GTX, you know, product, a top tier product with not the top tier die.

Starting point is 00:42:57 Now we had seen before a top tier die, but with, no, it wasn't the first time okay I'll talk a little bit about that other one later um we had seen not a top tier die uh or we had seen a top tier die but not all of it so a slightly cut down one and that would that would be due to yields right they just couldn't get enough fully working ones to make it economically viable but we hadn't seen them launch a flagship gpu with uh with with a cut down with a not top tier die and then we didn't get big kepler until 700 series so we got kepler and then we got kepler again something we again i don't think had actually seen in the past but that's with an asterisk because the 9000 yeah the 9000 series was a little bit more complicated where 8000 series was awesome g80 so that's eight zero so that was a big die was the 8800 gtx and the 8800 ultra was uh kind of usurped

Starting point is 00:43:56 by g92 which was a shrunk and just like way more efficient even though it was smaller um die so the 8800 gt came out and kind of made the gtx look pointless from a cost perspective and then they tweaked that and released the 9800 gtx which was not a big die but there wasn't a big diversion it was just uh was just a really weird time for for nIA because they couldn't innovate as easily as they had been able to before that because they couldn't just keep shrinking the manufacturing process. That was kind of where we started to ask the question, is Moore's law dead? Is GPU innovation going to slow down in a big way? And it has. And that's the same thing where I'm talking about them boiling the frog in terms of slowing things down. There were definitely times when they could have probably pushed harder, but started stretching,

Starting point is 00:44:49 you know, how long a GPU generation should stick around for, from, you know, I mean, they were, they were launching new stuff, like eight, 10 months after previous generation sub one year windows for a bit there and then it went to a yearly cadence and then it went to i mean 18 months is fine right two years two years seems okay by the way i found it it was called the amd uprising campaign like joining the rebellion and hashtag better red and stuff it's uh it was It was a weird campaign. I did not like it, but it is what it is. Not the first odd marketing we've seen and not the last. Moving on, next topic.

Starting point is 00:45:36 Should we do three merch messages? We never did breakfast. There was one of these for you. Yeah, let's do a few merch messages. Dan, can you hear us? Yeah, of course. It's do a few merch messages. DANNY K. Dan, can you hear us? Oh, yeah, of course. DANNY K. Oh, it's Daniel Besser. DANNY K. Hi.

Starting point is 00:45:49 DANNY K. Oh, wait, I'm supposed to explain merch messages. DANNY K. That's right. DANNY K. Merch messages, they're these things. They're how you interact with the show. We launched a new product on the store. Hey, Dan, do you have the capability of showing people the new product? DANNY K. Technically, yes.

Starting point is 00:46:05 Oh. Can we use AJ for this? Oh, this is going to be embarrassing. I mean, I guess we could show it on the website. Yeah, this might take a minute, though. I have a couple on the table. We could just show them with a camera. That, you know what?

Starting point is 00:46:28 I'm going to propose something even jankier oh i love it it's the fleece lined jacket it's a sweater it's a jacket it's launching in june because we just love our australian community so much actually it's because we only launch things when they're ready and this is when it happens to be ready. Wait, no, it's a shirt or a jacket. Oh, shirt meets jacket, excuse me, yeah. I could show it with the producer cam. It's pretty cool. It's very warm,

Starting point is 00:46:59 but it still looks, you know, just kind of like a shirt. You know, it's nice for going out. I would say on a fall day, going for a walk in the park, you're not going to reach for anything else once you have one of these. It looks sharp. Yeah. Yeah, it looks really sharp.

Starting point is 00:47:20 We tried to make this reversible. Fun story. It did not work. Oh, yeah. Yeah. sharp we tried to make this reversible fun story it did not work oh yeah yeah we thought it would be really cool if this kind of like camo uh camo stripey inner material was actually wearable on the outside and it was not yeah we we do have a reversible garment coming soon but it is it is not this day uh anywho if you want to pick up one of these or anything else you know water bottle screwdriver um stick locks have been really

Starting point is 00:47:52 popular as well then head over to ltdstore.com and in the checkout right in the cart dang it in the cart a box will appear giving you the option to write a merch message. You can send a shout out for one of your friends or your mom who happens to watch the WAN show because she's Luke's mom. You can ask our producer a question. You can also post a question in hopes that Dan will choose your question to be addressed later on WAN show after dark, which there may not be any after dark because it is the morning where we are. Yeah, that's very unusual. Anyway, the point is, don't do super chats, you know, don't do Twitch bits or whatever else do merch messages, because then, even in the event that we don't get to your message, you get your order in the mail.

Starting point is 00:48:45 It's going to be quality. We do not talk nearly enough about how well-reviewed our products are. Just about every product on LTT Store, four and a half stars and up. We don't curate this stuff.

Starting point is 00:49:01 We believe in transparency. You go on the screwdriver page. Yeah. don't curate this stuff we believe in transparency like you go on the there's also a lot of reviews you go on the screwdriver page there's yeah it's it's it really is like very funny to me when haters talk about what a failure the you know backpacker screwdriver were or whatever that you see 6900 reviews on screwdriver yeah nice and you know backpack no one would be stupid enough to buy this backpack it has almost 2500 reviews they didn't they didn't come from nowhere they weren't they're not generative ai reviews guys these are these are real reviews from real people that are

Starting point is 00:49:39 thrilled with it because it's a freaking awesome backpack um all right dan want to hit us with some merch messages yeah sure thing um let's see first one here hey o l l d would you ever want to fly to space how for how long and where would you like to go to space? Yeah. Definitely. Is it wondering where in space you want to go? Okay. Would you ever want to fly to space? Yes, for sure. How long? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:50:17 Ever? Where would you like to go? Not forever. Yeah, why not? Come on. You're not going to go to space forever. I'd be down no would you vacation to earth i'd be sad give a better answer um i don't know i would i would love to do a one year stint obviously this is never gonna happen a year year? Yeah, because then you get a special thing.

Starting point is 00:50:45 I don't know what it's called. It would be sweet. Destroyed bone density? It's an achievement. You get a one-year achievement. It's basically that. I think you get some special badge or something. I never thought about it that way.

Starting point is 00:51:01 Oh, my. Oh, my. There we go. My laugh is very obnoxious um it's called muscle atrophy there's ways to stave that off the scarier thing is your bones um but you address both in the same way you do it by working out um it's not gonna happen a year well yeah but answer the question proper okay where would you go you just would want to orbit or what i think whatever gets you the most patches yeah probably uh i think i think if i mean okay if we want to think about that way if you could be the first

Starting point is 00:51:36 i think if you could be the first to step foot on mars that'd be sick that'd be sweet but if we're assuming that isn't so much of a thing yeah i don't think i'd want to do the whole mars thing it's really far i think i'd be far more likely to go to a moon base and then come back because it's been more time yeah it is actually like wild how much closer it is yeah it's kind of wild how much closer the iss is compared to the moon i think a lot of people don't consider that as well yeah it's actually a lot further not that close yeah it's kind of wild how much closer the ISS is compared to the moon. I think a lot of people don't consider that as well. Yeah, the moon is like a lot further. Not that close.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Yeah, it's like genuinely not. But yeah, I think like an actual lunar base would be pretty sweet. Because honestly, I don't see the difference between the ISS and a lunar base being all that much. In terms of cost or in terms of... No, like the experience. Really? No, sorry. You're high. No, no, no no no wait wait no you sir i don't see that wait wait wait i said it wrong i don't see that building back there you're higher than that building i don't see the benefits of being on the iss or another orbiting station being much higher than being on a station that is on the surface and then i see

Starting point is 00:52:45 probably being able to exit the station and go wander around the moon being much more likely than spacewalks because spacewalks are like super super coveted right and even a bunch of astronauts that don't go up are never allowed to do spacewalks yeah so like i think it's much more likely if you're actually on. I would 100% want to just like, I mean, not golf because you'd never find the ball, but I would want a sports ball on the moon. Putting a little tracker in a golf ball and then just whacking it would actually be pretty cool. You'd never, like, I'd want to get it back though. Like, I'd want to see it go and you would like it would just i assume anyway i don't know i've never been to it would depend how hard you hit it

Starting point is 00:53:30 because i mean the moon has great like it's gonna theoretically unless you can get like escape velocity from the moon yeah no i'd want to like no i just i just would it go around the horizon potentially like i don't know i mean you wouldn't be able to see it anymore yeah i definitely almost certainly that's that's the bigger concern i think uh but like no i'd want to throw like a football the isis has no gravity that can affect experiments yeah but like i'm a big dummy i don't think i'm doing experiments yeah no i mean yeah no i i would just i would want to help i would want to play sports ball like i just, I'd want to see how fast I could whip a baseball in, like, almost no atmosphere. Yeah. Because there's also no wind resistance, essentially, compared to Earth, anyway.

Starting point is 00:54:13 Jake mentioned playing badminton on the moon. Yeah, exactly, right? That would be pretty sick. Yeah. That would be actually very fun. Or not fun. Yeah, or terrible. It might be not fun at all.

Starting point is 00:54:22 Because it would be really slow. No, it might be not fun at all because it would be really slow no it'd be fast what slows down the the shuttle is air resistance like it okay so there's only so low there's only certain shots where it falls down if you were the smashes would be terrible yeah if you hit smash, no one would be able to stop it. That's pretty great. That'd be freaking fun. Anyway, okay, hit me again, Dan. Sure thing.

Starting point is 00:54:54 Hello, Luke and Linus. How do you think AI will affect gaming in the near future? Do you think it will be... Do you think it will make them lazy and slap it everywhere instead of polishing the games games or will it be more conservatively used i think i curated this for a specific reason and it was the word lazy because ai is not lazy what it is is a tool And I think that we're going to see very lazy implementations of AI.

Starting point is 00:55:29 And Luke and I talked about this actually a little bit earlier on the show, where, yeah, I think developers are going to look at this AI buzz and go, okay, how can we cram AI into our game now so that we can put it on the box and hopefully sell a few more units to nerds who want to try out AI conversations with their waifus or whatever. I think that's gonna be a genre that's gonna lean heavily into AI

Starting point is 00:55:56 and be an innovator in the space, better for worse. But in much the same way that, you know, we could look at, man, what would it, what would be a, what would be a comparable, comparable feature? Now I can't come up with anything right now because my brain is bad, but AI is a tool. So the fact that someone uses a hammer, that doesn't make them lazy. Like the fact that someone uses a hammer that doesn't make them lazy like the fact that they use a hammer instead of putting the nails in by pushing them with their thumbs that's not laziness so as long as they're still working hard there's nothing inherently lazy about using a better tool now their ai has some ethical yeah questions around it that need to be answered and and some

Starting point is 00:56:48 genuine like something that could be interpreted as lazy because i mean you've talked about this too right if you were going to play a single player game you wouldn't want all the dialogue to be written by ai yeah because you'd want it to be more focused and like efficient almost not 100 but like every word should have a reason for being there, those types of things. So I don't know. I think you're going to see a huge range of this, which shouldn't be too surprising

Starting point is 00:57:13 if you've experienced much of the gaming industry. I'm sure we'll see some Battlefield game or something that has absolutely atrocious dialogue because it's all just AI-generated or something. And we are going to see maybe not laziness. This is the other reason I really didn't like this word because lazy seems to apply it to the actual devs themselves. Whereas I think it's more likely to be a cost cutting measure from management.

Starting point is 00:57:41 Yeah. Right. So what was, shoot, I've, I've forgotten but there was some game where the box art was apparently almost certainly procedurally generated oh did you did you see this i there has also been games where their box art was just stolen from people but yeah i'm yeah in this case that it looked like it was procedurally generated because like the guy had like six fingers and there were little details and some artists kind of

Starting point is 00:58:11 broke down you know what's what's going on here and what makes it obvious duke nukem the duke nukem remaster yeah yeah pull it up pull it up have a look sorry guys we don't have a good way of screen sharing right now so please uh you know pull this up for yourself yeah here we go duke nukem remaster ai box art is what luke typed in and apparently the the artist who was involved has you know used generative ai for artwork in the past as well so in in this case, was it laziness? Was it an extremely tight budget? Did they give the go-ahead to use AI? I haven't looked into this any further yet.

Starting point is 00:58:54 So take this for the ignorant speculation that it is. But I don't think it's fair to assume that it's just laziness. But I also don't think it's impossible. assume that it's just laziness, but I also don't think it's impossible. Yeah, this is pretty jank. I see why people are kind of annoyed about this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:59:15 Yeah. That's just like a hand floating under the firearm. It's not even in anything. That's not a barrel. It just actually isn't. I don't anything. That's like not, that's not a barrel. It just actually isn't. I don't know. That's weird.

Starting point is 00:59:31 Yeah. Anyways, next up. Can do. And I guess this will be our last one for this section. Hi, LLD. I'm 16 and do more robotics techie videos on YouTube. In the early days of LTT, how did you stay motivated and how long in the future would you say YouTube would still be a feasible career? Eating to eat is a pretty good motivator. I think we're also all pretty determined

Starting point is 01:00:01 to like make this thing work. Yeah, I was, I mean, I've talked about this in the past before, but one of the major motivators for me was just that I was tired of working with people that I didn't, I didn't enjoy working with, whether it was reporting to people who I didn't think deserved their positions, who I didn't think deserved their positions, who I didn't think were very smart, or whether it was having to collaborate with people who were obvious nepotism hires and had no valuable skills to bring to the table whatsoever.

Starting point is 01:00:35 I wanted a company that was not built like that, and the only way to get that is to start my own. The only way to get it and be sure it won't go away is to start my own fair enough yeah and so i just really needed this thing to work um you know yvonne and i also just generally bet really heavily on it and so you know especially once we acquired the langley house i mean it's it's funny to look back at it now, but we thought we were buying at the peak at like the highest conceivable, you know, housing pricing ends up, we got a stellar deal or whatever, but we didn't know that at the time. So we thought we were basically putting everything

Starting point is 01:01:18 we had into this company. Um, and we, and we just really needed it to succeed. And then there were multiple phases where we kind of did the same thing again. When we bought the office, we thought the same thing that we were buying at the peak and it couldn't possibly go any higher. So we thought we were completely betting the farm and we needed this to succeed or like going back to our jobs, there was no possible way we were paying this office mortgage. That wasn't happening. Right. So yeah, eating major motivating factor. Um, as for how long in the future did I think YouTube would still be a feasible career? I'll tell you this. We started Linus tech tips.com the forum before we actually launched Linus media group, the company and LinusTechTips.com, the forum, before we actually launched Linus Media Group, the company. And LinusTechTips.com, maybe not main reason,

Starting point is 01:02:11 but at least half of its main reason for existing is in case YouTube just decides, you know what, forget about this channel anymore. We didn't have a contact at YouTube at that time. We didn't know that they would continue to take the creator community seriously. We didn't know if they would just, you know, cut your AdSense payment or...

Starting point is 01:02:34 Maybe get three strikes out of nowhere. Or take it away entirely. Like, we didn't know what the plan was for the platform. Right? We were just guessing. So at the time, no, would i would i would take every deal i would make every video thinking this could be the last one and i don't think that really changed until three four five years in really i mean even now it still feels sketchy because of like just dealing with algorithmic throws all the time like i don't know

Starting point is 01:03:08 it's a it's a very unsettling industry to work in it just is yeah that's a good point luke was telling me he had some meetings with some creators that um that were, I don't know if bewildered is the right word, but just taken aback when he talked about how stressed we get about algorithmic changes or about, you know, whether just the fear we have for our survival. And they're like, well, I thought you were past that point. And I was like, I don't I thought you were past that point. And I was like, I don't think everybody,

Starting point is 01:03:48 anybody ever gets past that point. That's the thing about, um, like exponential decay, right? Is no matter how high you start, everyone ends up at zero. There's a near infinite graveyard of extremely massive, extremely successful very talented creators and channels and all that kind of stuff that were household names on youtube

Starting point is 01:04:13 that are effectively just gone that are in a lot of cases still making content they won't see them in your recommendation feels like it can really happen to anyone. Really? Anyway, I've seen channels with, with millions of subscribers that get hundreds of views. It's like, Oh man.

Starting point is 01:04:36 And in some cases, in some cases they change the content and it's just not working anymore. In some cases they didn't change the content and that's contributing to it not working anymore. And in cases, they didn't change the content, and that's contributing to it not working anymore. And in other cases, I'm looking at it going, I can't really tell the difference. You know, the point is not to name and shame. No. But this person in particular did like a series.

Starting point is 01:05:04 Or wait, is this? Is that the right one one mmm think I know what when you're talking oh here we go here we go this one this one yeah let me just make sure because I don't want to mmm yeah yeah yeah um yeah yeah yeah uh i don't know but basically i might not name it yeah yeah there was a creator that was doing real amazing and then just kind of completely fell off the map i'm talking like her top video has over 50 million views 11 years ago. And there's multiple videos here with 10 million views and more doing challenges and stuff. And then just,

Starting point is 01:05:54 you know, she's, she's talked about this. I think if, if I'm remembering correctly, she's talked about how it felt like she just disappeared overnight algorithmically and again this is a channel with millions of subscribers nobody nobody is nobody is safe yeah um let me just see. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yes. Okay. It's GloZell. Um, so she did an interview talking about how she went broke, uh, shared some advice for young creators and, um, yeah, being, yeah,

Starting point is 01:06:39 this is, this is great being broke with millions of subscribers. She shares her story of hardship. is great being broke with millions of subscribers she shares her story of hardship yeah yeah it's such it's a really it's a really interesting fall right because it's not the type of content that i consume so i'm not really qualified to evaluate whether you know she changed or or didn't change or what what the problem was that caused this precipitous decline in viewership. But no one's, no one's safe. That's, that's the whole point.

Starting point is 01:07:12 So we're, we just need to, we need to keep reinventing. We need to keep pushing and we can never take our foot off the gas because if we do, we die. It's I, I often use shark analogies internally.

Starting point is 01:07:26 Stop swimming, die yeah like Ashley though okay so I think we go back to news sure why not couple additional topics alright secret

Starting point is 01:07:43 gigabyte backdoor. Security researchers at Eclipsium released findings showing millions of gigabyte motherboards were sold with a UEFI boot kit containing an insecure backdoor. Eclipsium says the hidden code is meant to be an innocuous tool to keep the motherboard's firmware updated, but it's been implemented insecurely, potentially allowing the mechanism to be hijacked. On Windows machines, the program writes a Windows.exe embed into the firmware to disk in the system32 folder and runs it. The exe sets itself up as a Windows service and attempts to fetch an executable from one of the URLs.

Starting point is 01:08:27 That is brutal. One URL uses HTTP, which is easily for an attacker to intercept, and other links, which do use HTTPS, are similarly vulnerable due to poorly implemented remote server certificate validation routes.

Starting point is 01:08:42 Let's do a real quick summary here. In the firmware, on this motherboard, they have a tool that allows them to update and keep updated the UEFI BIOS, which sounds cool. Which is really cool, but the firmware actually can just write an EXE to the system 3D folder. Which disguises itself want windows service i want to know how microsoft allows random exes to be written to the system32 folder to be clear i'm not saying gigabyte is innocent here yeah i'm just i'm saying that this is clearly a breakdown that has multiple contributing actors here. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 01:09:31 Okay, so one note, which is probably understood by most, but because this program is within the firmware, it is difficult for consumers to remove. Okay. The next note, at least 271 different models of motherboard are affected, including the most recent Z790 and X670 SKUs. Holy crap. There is no current evidence of the vulnerability being exploited. This is a pretty niche thing. I wouldn't be surprised if most places were unaware that it existed. A day after the story broke, Gigabyte has apparently rolled out updated firmware

Starting point is 01:10:07 to mitigate the issue, including updates for older motherboards that are affected. The problem is that there's going to be literally... Tons of people that don't update because people very, very rarely update their laptops. Millions, if not hundreds of thousands of boards out there that will never get these updates. And never even know this is a problem.

Starting point is 01:10:26 I mean, I have to. Well, wait, could they use their, could they use their updater tool? Oh. To like force an update? That's a good question. They might actually be able to kind of solve the problem. That's a really good question.

Starting point is 01:10:45 Guys, that's not in our doc. Let us know, Floatplane Chat. In the meantime, though, our discussion question here is, how would you rate Gigabyte's handling of the issue? I mean, the issue has existed for years, but... They probably didn't know. They mitigated it really quickly. What I'm assuming happened is Eclipsium found it told gigabyte allowed gigabyte to fix it but

Starting point is 01:11:08 then still wanted to break the news that makes sense so they launched the fix and the news at the same time but they did fix it yeah which is which is good yeah but they put in a backdoor which is which is bad yeah but the backdoor was not for you know sending your data to the CCP it was not for sending your data to the CCP. It was for helping keep your firmware up to date, which is good. But they didn't tell us, which is bad. Yeah, the good part is that they fixed it. Stuff like this is going to happen.

Starting point is 01:11:43 I don't want to be that guy that's just like excusing it. But I think we also have to be somewhat realistic. I feel like a lot of the time coverage of problems with products forgets the human element. Did you kind of get what I mean by that? Yeah. Yeah. Like this seems like, I mean, it seems like a mistake. It's not good.

Starting point is 01:12:05 I wouldn't be happy about it if I was a consumer of a Gigabyte motherboard that this affected. But like, it's also fixed immediately. So it's not like Gigabyte was like, yeah, that's 271 models of motherboard. We don't feel like supporting some of these old motherboards. As far as I can tell, at least from the notes in here, they updated everything. And as long as you do your own due diligence, or maybe this thing can auto-update itself. Yeah, but I mean, that's a really good point. Because that's one of those things that worked out this time, but wouldn't necessarily have.

Starting point is 01:12:42 I mean, look at Spectre and Meltdown. Intel was basically just like yeah it's been a long time that stuff's legacy forget it and that's not cool i get it but that's not cool um and if this if we hadn't found this for another five years, would they have gotten updated? Probably not. Probably not. Probably not.

Starting point is 01:13:15 And so, yeah, good guy Gigabyte dealing with it, but also it's far better to just not do that in the first place. Yeah, for sure. I just, like, I don't know. If a company exists for a long enough period of time something like this is going to happen yeah we've uh uninfamous alex says we forget the human element because we're treated so poorly um anti-consumer market it's become uh yoda is writing into the land show here and you know what yeah i you know, I get it. And I think that's, you know, I think that's pretty, I think that's pretty fair in a lot of cases. But I also think that, you know what, maybe part of it is just that I get to, I get to be face to face with the people who build these products sometimes. with the people who build these products sometimes.

Starting point is 01:14:04 And knowing that they're trying really hard makes me more appreciative of the things that do go well sometimes. And it's not in like a, it's not in a, like a, oh, I'm, you know, compromised kind of way. Like it's not about money changing hands. Like I remember getting a pretty different perspective on Intel when I went to the Optane launch event. It was super data center focused, but some of the gaming folks who were involved,

Starting point is 01:14:30 like directly involved in bringing Skull Trail to market, that was their super cool dual socket enthusiast thing that was really expensive and kind of dumb. It was awesome though. But very cool. Were there and just talking about how hard they push internally for

Starting point is 01:14:45 these cool skunk works projects and stuff like that. And it just, they didn't, they didn't pay me any money or anything like that. It just, you know, you meet people and you get a better understanding of what they're about. And you learn that even these soulless companies and the shareholders, I, I have not changed how i feel about shareholders yeah yeah yeah at all yeah shareholders are are they're a necessary evil i think is the nicest thing i can say about shareholders uh for public companies in particular where the only the only outcome they want, typically speaking, is more money. So I haven't changed how I feel about them, but the actual workers, the actual people, the engineers, the designers, the janitors, it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:15:37 The people who are working on bringing us these products, a lot of the time, they're really passionate. They actually love what they do. Another really surprising moment for me was when I went to Micron. And that was a sponsored video. So, you know, take this for whatever, whatever. You can talk about what a shill I am or whatever, but that has nothing to do with it. I was just blown away by how excited these people were to make better memory and to get a chance to talk about it yeah that's the other thing guys that's a big one these are

Starting point is 01:16:12 not professional actors who are pretending to be so happy dappy working at micron so that i'll make a nice video about them it's not it's that. These were, these were like the people who actually work on this stuff. And you can tell when someone's passionate because you ask a question and they talk for 10 minutes. I was going to say they won't stop talking about it. Yeah. Finally, someone has asked me this. Yeah. Do you know how long I toiled on this particular problem? And you know, other than my direct manager everyone else in my life I'm bound by NDA right like I'm just so thrilled to be talking to somebody about this you know and it's it's so cool right and like it was the same at the Intel Design Lab that I visited in in Tel Aviv right like it was the same at the Intel design lab that I visited in Tel Aviv, right?

Starting point is 01:17:07 Like these people were just, you know, in some cases, the products were honestly not ones that I personally enjoyed. Sure, yeah. But they were really proud of how they, you know, set a target, you know, in collaboration with management who was beholden to shareholders. But this team, you know, damn it, they couldn't control that. But they set a target and dang it, they hit it, you know, time and time again. And this isn't a fab team. So Intel's had a lot of challenges shrinking their process nodes. But this was like a chip design team.

Starting point is 01:17:43 And they were just proud they were just proud of the work they were doing I'm like that's cool you know that's really cool and I want to I want to support that and I've got to understand that there's a lot of people watching when we make a video and some of them are the consumers and we need to talk to them about whether you should or shouldn't actually buy this thing and And some of them are the shareholders. And some of them are the people who actually designed these products. And, you know, I just I want to show respect.

Starting point is 01:18:15 And I think we've taken some criticism recently for how we how we show both sides of a product. But I think that's really important. We should appreciate what's good. I mean, do we do we want to get so jaded and cynical that we that we just can't appreciate the good of the tech that we can't just take joy in how cool this stuff is anymore? There's also and I've talked to you about this, but this is actually something that has consumed a surprisingly large amount of my thoughts lately which is i've noticed this i feel like it's surprisingly recent but maybe i just haven't been super tuned in uh but i've noticed a trend where a lot of the audience is very intent on all of the reviewers whether whether written or video or whatever,

Starting point is 01:19:07 all saying the same thing. They want everyone to say the exact same thing. I think that's super bad and very dangerous. Interesting. Do you think there's too much groupthink going on right now? I think there is definitely too much groupthink going on right now. My reason for that is I think it's beneficial not only to the audience but to all the reviewers as well, regardless of what medium they have, to have reviewers taking different approaches, trying different things, coming to slightly different conclusions. And then you as the audience check out a bunch of different pieces of content and make up your own mind based on these different approaches.

Starting point is 01:19:44 That is how I think it should work. That is how I think it has worked for a really long time. So when you absorb some piece of content, whether you're reading it or watching or listening to it or whatever, and then go to a different one and see a slightly different take. And all of a sudden one of them has to be right. Yeah. And one of them has to be wrong. them has to be right yeah and one of them has to be wrong yeah i don't think that's good right i think that's bad um so just want to throw that out there i think that's like actually extremely bad and i think this is one of those situations and i i hazard to say this type of stuff but like you don't want that yeah like i think you're you're you're chasing the wrong thing. I think that if you get to the result of what this thing is, it's going to be just bad for everybody

Starting point is 01:20:30 because you're going to get crazy consolidation. There will be less reviewers. And then that will result in less things being found. And it's just bad. I mean, I think it's a pretty clear... I think I've always been consistent. More competition is more better. Yes.

Starting point is 01:20:43 And we can't say that about hardware manufacturers and not, and then, and then go, Oh, but, but, but, but,

Starting point is 01:20:53 but we need to be the only reviewer that you listen to. Yeah. No one voice should ever, ever be the only one in your ear. That's always bad. Every time. It will never work out well. And that's one of the reasons that we have tried to be so collaborative with the rest of the tech community. I mean, I think recently we've talked about how obviously, you know, we're trying to build our organization to build the best possible content we can. You have to. And, you know, if people are finding it hard to deliver the same quality of content,

Starting point is 01:21:30 then, like, sorry, you know, find a different angle, right? You know, and, you know, let's go. But we've also tried to work hard to, you know, build a spirit of collaboration in the tech community as well. I mean, you name a tech creator and we've probably collaborated with them at some point, or if we haven't, we've probably invited them to LTX this year.

Starting point is 01:21:51 There's actually a lot of creators that I have never even met that are coming to LTX this year, and I'm super excited. We wanna- We wanna bring people together. We want to, I wanna see collabs. I think it's gonna be really exciting.

Starting point is 01:22:02 It's gonna be really fun. And that's because we're putting our money where our mouth is. We're literally spending six figures on creator travel and hotels for LTX. We're spending a freaking lot of money to put our money where our mouth is and show that we actually do care about this. You guys should have as many voices as possible when you're trying to evaluate what to spend your hard earned money on because nobody is going to see things exactly the way you do. And if they do, you got to kind of look in the mirror and go, are these actually my thoughts? Are these just someone else's thoughts? And I'm just parroting them? Am I actually doing

Starting point is 01:22:46 any critical thinking here? That's something. Never stop critically thinking for yourself. I realized I never kind of came back to have I buried the hatchet with NVIDIA? Someone asked, have I resolved things with Jensen? I haven't talked to Jensen in many years. I think the last time I talked to Jensen was just to introduce myself at an event or something like that. I've never really spoken with him at length or anything. But I definitely had some issues with our previous NVIDIA rep

Starting point is 01:23:20 who simply revealed to me, regardless of the apology that went out to Hardware Unboxed afterward, revealed to me through his actions that he didn't respect media, didn't properly understand our role in keeping NVIDIA accountable, felt that we were simply part of NVIDIA's marketing apparatus. simply part of NVIDIA's marketing apparatus. And, and at that point, I just, you know, I never apologized for anything that I said. I think maybe an apology was expected, but I wasn't going to apologize because at the end of the day, I didn't say anything that was wrong. And, you know know it was it was my team my group uh my my media community that was disrespected

Starting point is 01:24:11 um you know i don't owe you an apology for calling you out for being disrespectful like that's actually not how that works and that particular rep is no longer with the company. So that they are retired now. And I met my new rep. So they started just a few weeks ago, I think. So before you before you jump in with conspiracy theories about how we're, you know, that's all that's why our video was, you know, more balanced for the 4060 or whatever. No, that's just how we're going to make videos where we want to look at everything. We want to shine a light on it from every angle. So this was my first time meeting them, but they basically came in and were like,

Starting point is 01:24:52 hey, I want to have a fresh start here. And I kind of went, that's nice. It was a tough meeting. It you know all sunshine and rainbows yeah well i mean there's some there's some there's some some old wounds to deal with there yeah there's been this is why it's always so funny to me to be told that I'm some kind of Nvidia shill. I like good products. And so that's not a bias. That's not being a fan boy. That's just evaluating things and then seeing how they are and forming an opinion. That's not, that's not bias. If something is good and you think it's good, that's just fact, right?

Starting point is 01:25:49 Like that's, and again though, back to what we said before, my fact is not necessarily your fact, right? If I love this product for gaming and you use some kind of professional software and it's been, they've had this bug for three years that completely ruins your life and you need to use something else. That's, that's your life, right? Like that's, that's your perspective and that's totally valid. Right. But for me,

Starting point is 01:26:14 it doesn't, it doesn't make me a fan to say this is a good product that works really well. It's expensive, but you got to give it to them. It works really well. Where was I going with this? I totally can't remember because my brain is bad. Right. Yeah, I always get a kick out of it when people think I'm some kind of Nvidia shill. Nvidia has done so little sponsored and paid work with us over the years that I don't even think they would register as like, uh, like how many decimal places would we have to get to? So you've got percentages of our

Starting point is 01:26:55 total overall income. And then you've got like a decimal of a percentage. I don't even think they'd be at one decimal. I think they'd be at two. Like they are functionally. Isn't it like most years there's nothing? Yeah, they've only worked with us like twice. Yeah, like actually. Like functionally negligible. Yeah. And which made it particularly funny to me

Starting point is 01:27:19 when I heard through the grapevine back after the hardware unbox thing that NVIDIA was putting pressure on their partners that they give marketing funds to, to not spend those funds with us. Because even accounting for pass-through, it's like negligible, like a non-factor. So they tried to put this, allegedly, tried to put this, I heard from two sources though. They tried to put this financial pressure on two two sources though they tried to put this financial pressure on us after the hardware unbox thing that's another thing is like they apologized to hardware unboxed i never got an apology for that um so there's been some i am not a fan

Starting point is 01:27:56 of nvidia and the way that they do business and so i made that very clear i made that extremely clear to our new rep that this relationship is not going to be repaired by coming in and saying, you know, it'd be great. A fresh start. Uh, yeah, yeah, sure. I guess that would be great. Um, but you're going to have to figure this out because as far as I can tell, a lot of NVIDIA's behaviors are not as simple as one rep going rogue, disrespecting the media, and engaging in these mafia thug business tactics. I've seen NVIDIA engage with their manufacturing partners in the same way, their board partners. I've seen NVIDIA engage with their retail partners in the same way. NVIDIA is a cutthroat company. They are competitive. They compete. And maybe that's a big

Starting point is 01:28:54 part of the reason they win so much. But that doesn't mean that they can't be respectful while they're competing. That doesn't mean they can't share some of the spoils of war. You know, we saw the way that they've squeezed margins for their board partners, for example, over the years. And so I basically said, look, I think that realistically, a lot of the problems I have with NVIDIA are not as simple as a fresh start. I appreciate anything that you think that you can do and what I can tell you is I will I will have an open mind you know I will I will try to have a fresh start but you're gonna have to understand that there's gonna be more to this than just the way that you treat me right I just I love this I love this saying or expression or whatever it is, where, you know, a man that's kind to you and rude to a waiter is a rude man, right?

Starting point is 01:29:51 And I experienced that a lot. for me to get prompt service on something, which is a big part of the reason that we do Secret Shopper, which is a big part of the reason that we are introducing our Secret Shopping Our Sponsors series, which is going to be kicking off very soon. I believe all of the background has been done, but the person who is working on that has other projects, so it's taking some time to get everything compiled and turn it into a script but i'm i'm really really excited to bring that series to you guys uh because we wanna we wanna know like are we just getting good treatment because nvidia wants to project being a nice guy through their treatment of us and turn us into fans. It's something we've always got to watch out for.

Starting point is 01:30:45 And, you know, maybe this is, maybe I'm jaded and cynical. Maybe, uh, maybe I'm just experienced. Sometimes I can't tell the difference, but it's the kind of thing that brands do.

Starting point is 01:30:57 They do it all the time. And that's not being, that's just being realistic. And it was, it was funny because there was another classic brand move that got pulled on this trip that I was a little frustrated with one of our team members for not being aware of. And then I kind of went, I talked to them yesterday and basically, like I had said some pretty direct words previously

Starting point is 01:31:23 and I don't take any of them back. You know, you know who you are, you had to hear it. I want you to learn. I want you to get more experienced. I want you to do better. Because like sandwiched a little better, though. Yeah, but I could have done a better job of the poop sandwich. but you know these are important life skills regardless of whether you're going to work here forever you're going to work somewhere else you got it you got to learn these things you got to take these with you and so i'm glad i told you but i could have been a bit nicer about it but basically what i said is like look brands have their agenda you have your agenda and you've got to keep these things separate you've got to understand you don't work for them and they are going to use every

Starting point is 01:32:10 possible trick in the book to manipulate you into doing what they want and in this case it was a sponsored project that was supposed to happen while we were here actually it was a couple things but the the one that started it was the sponsored project that was supposed to happen here with a big board maker where i wanted to see a gpu manufacturing line and i basically said sponsorship deal or no sponsorship deal i'm not going unless we're seeing a gpu manufacturing line i want to see a gpu start to finish. And then I want to power it on kind of like what we did at the micron factory. And in the lead up to the show, you know, I kept being told, okay, yeah, we haven't confirmed exactly what it's going to be. We haven't confirmed. We haven't

Starting point is 01:32:58 confirmed yet. And I'm like, you need to get this confirmed. You have to get this confirmed. We are flying 11 hours around the world or whatever it is. And you got to get this confirmed before we go. And I can see why it might not have seemed that urgent because we were going to Computex anyway. Yeah. Right. But when you're negotiating something, the more things you leave until the moment when you arrive, the more potential there is for what happens next, which is that on the day we were supposed to go and shoot this video, we were contacted in the morning and told, hey, we can't make the GPU manufacturing line work.

Starting point is 01:33:38 But what we do have is a new model of GPU that you can show and some cases and some upcoming... All like extremely basic level boring Computex content. Yeah. The like normal Computex content. So yeah, the sponsor deal is still on, but it's going to be this. And I kind of went, okay, I made this really clear. When I said before the show that the sponsorship deal is not on unless we are bringing content about GPU manufacturing to the people,

Starting point is 01:34:15 I meant it. That's not, it's not negotiable. It's not a conversation. I don't want to be talking about this right now because I already told you. And the thing is, I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but I am beholden to my boss. And I don't mean our incoming CEO. I mean you guys.

Starting point is 01:34:43 You guys are the boss. If I upload crap, you guys are going to downvote it or worse. You're going to not watch it. And then we talked about, you know, exponential channel decay. That's going to happen. It's a fight for survival every day. If I bring you guys, regardless of sponsorship dollars, right? Like that's what I'm, you know, that's what ultimately I have to do. If I want to get sponsorship dollars, I have to find a way to cram those into a project that is entertaining enough for you guys

Starting point is 01:35:15 that you want to watch it regardless of that, right? So, you know, I will sometimes take a project that I would just love to do. Like I would just love to see the Micron would just, I would just love to see the micron factory tour. That's actually a great example. I would have wanted to go regardless of the money, but I'll hold out. I'll basically go,

Starting point is 01:35:35 no, it's gotta be paid. Um, because realistically for something like that, they're going to, they're going to need a whole bunch of, uh, like NDA,

Starting point is 01:35:44 like type of privacy reviews. Yeah. Privacy control over it anyway. for something like that they're gonna they're gonna need a whole bunch of uh like nda like type of privacy tons of reviews yeah privacy control over it anyway so if they're gonna expect all of that then i'm sitting here going well then yeah then you pay the sponsorship dollar or i'm not going even though i'm sitting there going please do it right um so so that's what happened with this boardmaker is i basically went, look, I, I told you we're not going because my boss says that's not interesting enough. So we aren't going unless this is happening. And I think everyone was sort of taken aback, including the person on my team who kind of went, oh, when I said, okay, well, we're not going then.

Starting point is 01:36:26 We're going to go shoot something else. And we ended up going to the Gigabyte booth where we shot that cool Grace Super Chip video. That was a lot of fun. And later on in the week, we made another attempt at it. And whether it was a miscommunication or whether it was another effort to just get us on site so they could get us to talk about something else again, we arrived and it wasn't a manufacturing line or even a prototyping line, which is what I thought we were going to see. I thought we were going to see a prototyping line.

Starting point is 01:36:58 It was just like some PCBs and some finished GPUs and a soldering iron, which is not how they do it, which is not how they build GPUs at all. Um, and so we, we shot a quick, um, short for one of the channels and we just like left and,

Starting point is 01:37:21 you know, maybe it was a miscommunication. Maybe it was, um, you know, maybe they just wantedcommunication maybe it was um you know maybe they just wanted to get us in there to talk about this other stuff they wanted to talk about i'm not sure but it was a it was a really valuable learning experience i think for the way that the way that brands will will try to get you close or get you in the door and then once you're already there kind of go oh well sunk cost fallacy you might as well talk about this other thing because, you know, it would be a shame.

Starting point is 01:37:46 You've experienced it a bunch. Even when you do have a really solid agreement, it's often attempted. Yep. Yeah, we had an issue with a case manufacturer this year where we wanted to do something cool with one of their products. And they were showing it at this one location, but we wanted to do something at the other location. And they didn't want to give us the one that was at the one location for some reason, and they basically made us borrowing it contingent on going to their party, their event. And I was like, okay, I'll go, but I can't stay long

Starting point is 01:38:17 because I have a commitment. I'm playing badminton tonight, and I'm only going to go if there's food because – and I'm not trying to go if there's food because, and I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to be a diva about it, but I am on my way out the door to get food before I go exercise. I cannot go to exercise before I've eaten. So I can't go to your event unless there's food there. I arrived, there was no food. There was like, like a dozen of the last hors d'oeuvre that nobody wanted left. And there was, and immediately they started trying to brief me on their like product that I didn't come there to talk about.

Starting point is 01:38:55 And then what's even worse is before we got a chance to do anything with the thing we borrowed, they asked for it back. And one of our team members went full, just like errand person for them and like brought it back to them when we would have been going the next morning anyway. And I was like, so that was again, you know, like, Hey, these are the moves brands pull. They try, they try and make you their beta. And you can't, you can't be there for that. It's the answer is, the answer is no and it's not about being a jerk it's about standing your ground right and I don't

Starting point is 01:39:28 know maybe it's just like is it like a like a Canadian cultural thing just like wanting to be a people pleaser did I used to be more like that have I just know have I just gotten oh well okay then I think I think back in the day the video would have been made, but I think for different reasons. I think back in the day we valued volume very highly. Yeah. So we would just get a lot of content out all the time. So like...

Starting point is 01:40:00 It's always kind of funny to me when people talk about how much better our content used to be when we used to focus on quality videos from a show are you talking about sure dude we upload less now than ever um we used to have a thing at ces where you had 30 minutes per appointment and that included travel time yeah which could be switching hotels yeah like there was not time for for quality my dude yeah man looking back at old videos like there were certainly some fun and funny just dragon energy things that happened but i don't know about i don't know if quality is the right word to describe anything that we used to do compared to what we do today

Starting point is 01:40:45 yeah this is an impromptu topic sorry i'm kind of blindsiding you with this but i wanted to talk about why we didn't cover one of the big pieces of news at the show this year this was another sort of having to having to draw a line in the sand We were supposed to get seven videos this week and we ultimately didn't end up making one of them because partly through my own error, we arrived at a booth and realized that the people that we were about to cover had ripped off the community in the past. And I had, you know, not intentionally but i had been complicit and um that's not about to happen again yeah and that that's not going to happen again so

Starting point is 01:41:36 one of the one of the big things that the show was this super cool and i saw it i was briefed on it cool and I saw it I was briefed on it it's super cool but this collaborative case between Streecom and Kaleos that's capable of dissipating they say 600 but actually it's more like 700 watts passively depending on the thermal output of your CPU and GPU so it has two loops and they're identical, but they rate, I think the CPU one slightly lower just because most CPUs are not going to hit that level anyway or something like that. I forget.

Starting point is 01:42:15 There's some reason that one of them is like rated a little bit lower when they talk about the product overall. But actually, if you had a differently balanced system, it could even dissipate a little bit more heat. So I arrived. Oh, right. So first, let's talk about who these folks are. So Streepcom, tons of respect. I love those guys. They do just a great, great job of manufacturing super sleek aluminum cases and accessories and stuff like that. In fact, they make the test benches that we use for the lab, really cool modular test benches that like pack flat. Awesome. Actually, hold on. Yeah. That is Streecom, right? Yeah. Yeah. The open bench table. Yeah, that thing is sick.

Starting point is 01:43:06 Isn't it Streetcom? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's Streetcom. Cool. So Streetcom makes that. Love those guys. Now let's talk about Kaleos. Do you guys remember the passive 300-watt or 350-watt case from six years ago? Kickstarter campaign.

Starting point is 01:43:23 Do you remember this thing? It was pumpless, which was super cool. So it's full of refrigerant. And then the heat from the CPU or, well, I mean, or GPU and GPU, whatever, would force, would cause the refrigerant to evaporate. And then it would start moving and then it would condense. And then it would actually start flowing on its own

Starting point is 01:43:44 without any kind of pumping system. so the whole thing was completely silent super cool tech they raised a quarter million dollars on kickstarter give or take and then ghosted um nobody who bought one of yeah nobody who bought one of those original cases ever got anything for their money, as far as I can tell. And this was a significant amount of money. This case was over $500 on average, right? Because remember, Kickstarter, there's the different tiers depending on how early you fund it. And I covered the case. In fact, I covered them twice. Once I covered the case, actually, it might've been three times. I don't remember anymore,

Starting point is 01:44:35 but I definitely covered it at least twice. I covered the case in our studio and tested it, and it was amazing and super cool. And then I covered another collaborative project they were doing on like a smaller cube passive system later on at a trade show at CES or something like that. And I took a lot of, so, okay, yeah, people are in the chat here. I thought they collapsed. Well, no, they didn't.

Starting point is 01:45:02 I thought they collapsed. Well, no, they didn't. Kallios did, existed before and still exists now. I mean, their main business is B2B cooling solutions, like silent, passive cooling solutions. And they work in all kinds of different industries, including like, they have some history in the aerospace industry, for example. And so they had the experience with cooling and they had the backing.

Starting point is 01:45:35 They had the reputation as a real company that made me comfortable promoting this as a product that genuinely would exist, where they would overcome the challenges and actually deliver these to people. And they just didn't. They just didn't deliver them. And I want to tell both sides of the story here, because I actually had the Kaleos founder, and I also had the new CEO of Kaleos there in the booth with me. And they basically went like, look, we spent three times the amount of the Kickstarter backers trying to make this thing happen.

Starting point is 01:46:10 There were challenges we didn't foresee. We were naive. It was a smaller team. And I'm sorry we didn't deliver anything, but it was Kickstarter. And I kind of went, okay, that's not really how that works. Um, but what about people's money? And they're like, okay,

Starting point is 01:46:33 we have a solution for that. And I go, okay, I would like to hear your solution because I basically got the briefing and I told them we have two we have two paths here either you tell me how you're going to make this right and it's and i make good and i make a video about this yeah or you don't tell me how you're going to make this right and i walk away and i'm not acknowledging your company here um and they go, okay, no, no, we have a solution for this. For everyone who backed the original case, they will get a voucher for the full amount of their backing

Starting point is 01:47:13 toward the new case. And I went, on the surface, that sounds possibly pretty okay. Note that it's not a whole new case, though. What's the delta here? Well, the new case can dissipate about double the heat. And it's a much nicer looking design. It's lighter. However, the new case is priced according to its heat dissipation capabilities.

Starting point is 01:47:42 So they were offering a credit of 500 and change 500 essentially uh let's say let's say 575 towards a 1000 case and i'm sitting here going um this is interesting shot key and twitch chat Twitch chat has an uncharacteristically terrible take for Twitch chat, and that's really something. So you blackmailed them. No, I didn't blackmail them. That's not what blackmail is. You should go look up what blackmail is.

Starting point is 01:48:18 That's not even sort of what that is. Anyway. It's amazing how confused people get sometimes. Sorry. way. That's amazing how confused people get sometimes. So sorry, they offered. So they're offering, let's say 600. Let's round up. They're offering a $600 voucher for $1,000 product. And I kind of went, so are you serious right now? You took my money. Let's say hypothetically, I'm one of these buyers. You took my money, my significant amount of money six years ago. And you're coming back to me now saying, no, but we're really going to ship you something this time. All we need is double your money, more money. Needless to say, I wasn't happy with with that I didn't consider that acceptable I said I said that's a

Starting point is 01:49:10 good option that people should have but at the end of the day they need to also have the option to have their money back because the way that it works is if you're a real company that behaves like a real company, when you take someone's money and you don't ship them a product, then you should give them their money back. And they kind of went, yeah, but it was Kickstarter. It was a small team. It was an offshoot Skunkworks project. And I go, okay, but this is your integrity we're talking about.

Starting point is 01:49:46 I'm not talking about your legal obligations here. I'm talking about your integrity as a company, as a person. The right thing to do if you take someone's money and don't deliver it and don't deliver the product is to give them their money back. And they basically, this is when I was talking to the founder and they basically went, look, I have to discuss this with the new CEO. Let me get back to you. I said, okay, well, I'm going to go, you know, check out the rest of the show floor, see if there's anything else cool to cover. And we'll, we'll go from there. And you

Starting point is 01:50:19 just, here's my cell. Just give me a call when you guys have had a chance to talk about it. here's my cell. Just give me a call when you guys have had a chance to talk about it. And we'll, we'll go from there. So I get a call a few hours later and classic brand tactics. They go, okay,

Starting point is 01:50:32 we've, we've talked about it. We've come to a solution. I'm like, okay, cool. What is it? They're like, well,

Starting point is 01:50:37 why don't you swing by the booth? And I go, why don't we just talk about it on the phone? Because it should be a simple answer. If the news was good, they would just tell me. Yeah. But I was like,

Starting point is 01:50:48 realistically, you know what? Andy and Jake are about to order food. Get me one of whatever Jake's having. And I'm going to hobble over to the booth. And I, and I, and I will,

Starting point is 01:51:00 I will tell them no in their faces because whatever, I'm not, I'm not afraid of that. If they think that bringing me there is going to somehow make me change my line in the sand that I've drawn, then I've got something else coming. So sure. I'll play your game. So I get there and they tell me, okay, you know, what if it was, you know, what if it was some kind of, you know,

Starting point is 01:51:24 shares in the... What if in addition to the discount, they got some kind of share in the profits of the new product? I'm sitting here going, what are you even talking about? I know that I had discussed how Kickstarter is sort of dumb because it's basically investment where you don't get any equity, right? Because it's either buying a product or it's kind of that, right? And both of them are sort of, well, buying a product is fine unless the product doesn't get delivered, in which case,

Starting point is 01:52:00 it's basically just taking people's money, right? And I kind of went, well basically just taking people's money right um and i kind of went yeah i mean hey thanks for playing but that's actually not how this works if you guys are a real company with integrity then what you do is you give them back their money i also run a physical goods business we also make mistakes from time to time and when we do we eat it and you can always offer like oh if you don't take a refund and you take a credit towards the next thing will like bump up its value by a small amount or not even if you're happy with the credit take the credit that too but getting a refund needs to be an option yeah it should be possible and i understand what they're saying they made a car comparison they

Starting point is 01:52:40 were like uh you know we originally sold a citroen and now we're shipping a BMW. We can't just like ship everyone who paid for a Citroen and BMW. Yeah, totally. Yeah. A hundred percent. So refund them. So refund them. Cause you didn't ship the Citroen. You never shipped it. Yeah. And so the really baffling thing about this to me is that if Callios is a real company and they really do have any integrity whatsoever, um, this is such a small price to pay. The total backing was about a quarter million dollars,

Starting point is 01:53:18 which is a lot of money, which is a lot of money on like big manufacturing business scale. But if you're looking to just put this in the past for real do it properly and if you want a pr win you basically say look yeah we'll offer you a refund but we actually think it's a better play if you take the credit and get this much better case they'd probably convert a lot of people to the new case but they're trying to they're trying to eat the cake and have it too they're trying to just keep money from people who are not going to use the credit for the case seem like they're

Starting point is 01:53:57 looking like good guys and launch this new case and kind of go well we tried launch this new case and kind of go, well, we tried. Because none of those people are, unless they actually offer a refund, are going to be interested in their new promises. And you know what? It might be different this time. Streakcom assures me it'll be different. I trust them still because they're the manufacturing partner helping bring this thing to life. And feel bad for street con because it seems like they came into this having done nothing wrong ultimately just recognizing this is a super cool technology and wanting to bring it to gamers so i feel bad for them right but no at the end of the day this is not a kickstarter there's a big difference for me between a kickstarter from like

Starting point is 01:54:44 a dude in a basement trying to build a hammer that turns into a crowbar. And just ultimately not being able to figure it out. And a company launching a product on Kickstarter or launching a new product category on Kickstarter. or launching a new product category on Kickstarter. In terms of the trust that I have and my expectation that this company will behave in a way that is, that protects their reputation, right? Because at the end of the day, it's all trust me, bro. So with a company that has some kind of established reputation,

Starting point is 01:55:21 I look at it and I go, well, you probably want to maintain that so I can probably safely hand you my money. And in this case, that was not the case at all. And that's kind of a funny pun because there was no case at all. They never shipped one. And I basically said, look, we're not going to do it. So that's my... There is still no update on the hammer by the way i just checked the last update says we're back um june 4th 2022 we're almost at the one year anniversary of that we're gonna get there it's too bad because i really yeah yeah here's here's a much better Twitch take from Tom Smith.

Starting point is 01:56:08 If you see an ad for a $600 case and you go to the store and they say instead you have to buy a $1,000 case, that's called bait and switch. And that's even without collecting any money. Yeah, it's like... And yes, I know Kickstarter's terms do shield them from any kind of legal liability here. But... Yeah, but why would you trust that company the law is not the be-all and end-all of how we should treat each other yeah like by law you know

Starting point is 01:56:37 i'm allowed to uh like you can you can you can be kind of a dick bag and still not break the law you know that doesn't make it right I mean if you ever yeah flowpoint chat is like

Starting point is 01:56:56 laws are not morality, legal does not equal ethical, stuff like that law is the bare minimum yes so we didn't cover it and you know it's too bad Yes. Stuff like that. Yes. Laws the bare minimum. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we didn't cover it. And,

Starting point is 01:57:07 um, I'm, you know, it's too bad, but I, I just think at the end of the day, they had, they had an opportunity to relatively cheaply actually put this behind them. I really wanted to cover the product,

Starting point is 01:57:20 not just today, but going forward. I want, I want one, you know, like I actually want one and i wanted the views on it even if i was certain it would show up at this point i would not personally buy one i wanted the views yeah yeah but would you buy one if they offered a refund to everyone who

Starting point is 01:57:35 didn't get one okay well see that's what i'm talking about well okay i'm not like guaranteeing i would go purchase one immediately but you would definitely consider it. Because it is super cool. It's a very cool product. It's sweet. So, yeah. It's very possible. What's also possible is for us to tell you about our sponsors. Dan? Hello, Dan? Daniel?

Starting point is 01:57:58 Besser? Are you set up for this? Yeah. Mr. Besser, hello? Hello, Daniel? Can you actually not hear me? Can you hear me? No, we can hear you, but... Well, I wasn't going to tell him.

Starting point is 01:58:13 I refuse. We can hear you, but we can't see anything. So you kind of just got to tell us when to go. Yeah, sorry. Bastard Man is my favorite supervillain. We don't actually have any Dennis integrations today. So it's just weeds.

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Starting point is 01:59:38 you will be taken care of. So check them out at lmg.gg slash headphones.com. That's headphones.com, all spelled out. This show is also brought to you by our friends over at Moment. Are you a creative looking to make sure you have the best gear to capture your vision? Moment is here to help offering photo and video equipment for every occasion. Moment only works with the best brands, such as Sony, Fuji, and Leica. They even produce their own high-quality gear, too.

Starting point is 02:00:02 All Moment-branded gear comes with a two-year manufacturer's warranty, meaning more shots and lessica. They even produce their own high quality gear too. All Moment branded gear comes with a two year manufacturer's warranty, meaning more shots and less stops. Go to lmg.gg slash shop moment and check out their carefully curated catalog of gear. Below. Alright. Dan, what are we supposed to do now?

Starting point is 02:00:20 We've got three more merch messages. Is it weird just sitting in the studio by yourself? No, I'm hanging out with AJ. Chatting with people on the internet? Oh, AJ's here? So I don't look like a crazy person laughing to myself in an empty warehouse. Is AJ just sitting on the set?

Starting point is 02:00:39 Yeah, we're eating some sushi together. It's really nice. Are you both sitting on the set? Are you in my spot? Absolutely not. No, sir. I have a backup technical difficulties line of sitting in your spot. I think he has a better spot than me anyway.

Starting point is 02:00:56 Yeah. His desk actually fits legs under it. My spot is really uncomfortable. I was mostly making a Big Bang Theory reference. People are allowed to sit in my chair. I feel like I have to explain that because the number of people that take what I say seriously drives me to the wall.

Starting point is 02:01:12 Yeah, I pick it up too. I'm also not serious. Yeah, I sit in his chair all the time. Maybe. But you do? Don't look at me like that. Dan, we've talked about this. The whole company,

Starting point is 02:01:22 just to make sure there's a certain level of equality, the whole company after Monday morning meeting, actually at one by one, make sure that everyone sits in Linus's chair for at least 15 seconds. You're not in on Monday. What are we doing? Where am I? Oh yeah, merch messages. All right, so we got three to go. Yeah, hit me. Your thoughts. You once had a video on object recognition in surveillance systems using AI neural network ASICs. Do you see dedicated AI chips being all over devices in the next decade? Absolutely. 100%.

Starting point is 02:01:56 I mean, we're already seeing it. Intel. Oh, in fact, I think one of the topics in the doc is in our no, rather a topic we decided not to talk about, but is pretty cool. Anyway, I guess is that Intel showed off stable diffusion running on their, their new AI accelerated meteor Lake chip. And that's,

Starting point is 02:02:21 it's like what Luke said about how like private, you know, private machine learning models are going to be really important going forward. So being able to just like generate an image, I mean, you might not even, would you still need an internet connection? Maybe, maybe not. Wait for what? To just generate an image. As long, yeah, I mean, as long as you have enough storage for the model.

Starting point is 02:02:50 Yeah. Right? Yeah. So, I mean, they'll probably make you go through the cloud anyway. Well, and you could retrain. So like you could- Looking at you, Google, freaking voice assistant.

Starting point is 02:03:01 Anyway, sorry. No, but like stable diffusion itself, you can download, run it offline entirely. Oh, I've never never tried i didn't know that okay yeah cool so yeah being able to do that faster i mean yeah we're gonna see that in your laptop i mean we've been seeing we've been seeing um like machine learning course built into phones for quite some time doing everything from you know trying to optimize your battery life to uh optimizing your your photography right like yes ai chips in all the things whether you like it or not oh yeah it's absolutely a big thing a little bit different here how did the short circuit channel get its

Starting point is 02:03:38 name i want to say james is the one who came up with it. Because I think I talked about this once in the past. And I thought it was me or something. And then I think he corrected me. But I could have this memory completely wrong. And Gmail search is useless now. Oh, yeah, there's no way you're gonna find it. So if I were to try to find just the first reference to

Starting point is 02:04:06 short circuit in my inbox, that might just be impossible. Oh good. Jono used to have short circuit in his stupid email signature. So I have every email I ever got from Jono here.

Starting point is 02:04:22 Perfect. I don't think you're gonna find it. I mean isn't it kind of worth a shot to see the the conversation that we had around it? Here we go. Top names for new channel. Oh wait. Whoa so the name came for a different thing. It was Riley. So this is when we were... Okay. Okay. This is fun. Top names for new channel is the subject line from Mr. Nick Light, February 2018.

Starting point is 02:04:55 Careful, because apparently we might end up using these in the future. We're not going to use any of these. Okay. TechLinked or Clinked, pronounced Clinked. So it's like an abbreviated CH, like TechLinked or Clinked, pronounced Clinked. So it's like an abbreviated CH, like TechLinked. We didn't end up with Clinked because that was dumb. TechBrief, BriefTech, Brink of Tech, TechPoint. It's kind of like a tip. Best and Latest in Tech, BLT. We have always liked the acronyms. Quickie News. Quickie News. Ah, Quickie News held on for a little while.

Starting point is 02:05:26 I remember that. The Cash. And then I reply, I actually like TechLinked best out of them, adding Riley for his thoughts. The three that I kind of liked were TechLinked, TechPoint, and Quickie News. And then, let's see. Riley pitched in with... I got to say, I find myself gravitating toward TechLinked as well. We were trying not to do TechLinked.

Starting point is 02:05:50 Because it's just... It's so close to NetLinked. Well, but that was why. Yeah, I know. Like that... We're just like... What if instead of NetLinked, it was just TechLinked? Anyway.

Starting point is 02:06:04 Even though it was my suggestion, I was also kind of trying not to do it this one's pretty good i wouldn't say that so riley pitches in he goes yeah i find myself gravitating towards it as well but i feel like there's so many shows and sites that have tech in the name so i'd be less inclined to want that i've got a couple more to throw in the pot and one of them is a really good idea that we might use someday so we're not gonna say that one but he goes what about short-circuit that is the first reference to short-circuit so I think it must have been Riley we had some discussion short-circuit lost because of the movie dot dot dot problem. Kind of sounds like Inside Track, which is good,

Starting point is 02:06:52 but the movie problems. There's a movie called Short Circuit. So we made our name ultimately when we launched Short Circuit totally different by making it one word. One word. Got them. Searchability. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. totally different by making it one word. Got them. Searchability.

Starting point is 02:07:05 Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. I did not know that it was Riley, but it appears that it was totally Riley. Whether we realize it or not, is it possible? Okay, hold on. Short circuit branding discussion.

Starting point is 02:07:23 What is this? This is a doc. Meeting notes. This is amazing. I love just like poking around at this old stuff. Our objective for this meeting. Attendance, Nick, John O. James, and Linus. Objective, establish a baseline for the new channel's logo and branding direction. Meeting notes.

Starting point is 02:07:43 Should the name be one word or two? Linus wants it one word name and he likes it this i this is someone else's notes nick it should be in all caps if it's one word linus wants one word big ass big c i guess i won that executive flex short circuit big ass big c uh the reason i care about that, I wasn't just trying to be a jerk about it and just be like, no, this way. Because I like being able to abbreviate things. SC is easier when you clearly see the SC. Next step, color than graphics.

Starting point is 02:08:17 Colors, pink and yellow, says Linus. Baby blue and pink, says Nick. Linus wants eye searing. Nick says yellow is very aggressive and if you're looking at it on a screen it can be offensive linus wants to see options yellow and pink baby blue and pink what did we ultimately end up with pink i think so or baby blue pink orange and purple and white so that's yellow and yellow they're all in there every color no green no red no navy um and yeah i think i think none of those ended up making it 80s styling

Starting point is 02:08:55 digital branding both of those kind of stayed yeah oh this is so cool how did how did things come to be there you go these are the kinds of meetings that we have that I never want to have again. I shouldn't even say that because I do enjoy the creative process. I was going to say, you like some of that stuff. And that actually does fall under Vision Officer, sir. So good luck with that.

Starting point is 02:09:19 I just, I can't do all of it. That's the thing. I can't be in every one of these meetings anymore. Yeah. Like it's exhausting. I'd rather be on the camera on Short Circuit. All right, Dan, hit me. That's where you have channel managers. Sorry, one sec, Dan.

Starting point is 02:09:34 That's where you have channel managers because Riley is working on GameLinked, right? Yep. He's the channel manager for Linked in general, as far as my understanding goes. I'm sure he has more play into that Like he's the channel manager for linked in general, as far as my understanding goes. So like, I'm sure he has more play into the, that type of like,

Starting point is 02:09:53 were you involved in the picking of the primary colors for game linked? No. Yeah. So we've moved on. I actually first saw the logo live on WAN show when I was like, Oh, there's a channel for it. By the way,

Starting point is 02:10:03 it's driving Riley crazy. How much I keep talking about game linked on wanshow because dang it linus it's not ready for launch yet um so if you wanna if you wanna bother him go subscribe to game linked yeah because the more subscribers are on it the more he's like oh linus you keep talking about game linkeded. I wanted to do a big surprise launch. The surprise is over, so you might as well get subscribed so that at least he can launch the first video and it can get a ton of views because you guys will all get a notification

Starting point is 02:10:36 and you can watch it and it's going to be awesome because it's going to be TechLinked with games and you guys are going to love it. Oh, right, the pool. Okay, Dan, don't let me forget to talk about that after this one more merch message. Okay. Hey, LLD.

Starting point is 02:10:51 I love to see Luke back on camera and the two of you work... The two of you really work well together. What were some challenges with Luke returning and will we see more of him? Perhaps a short circuit? It was really hard to walk from the WAN set over. That was very tough.

Starting point is 02:11:10 Especially because you were waiting for WAN to start anyway when we did that PC cleaning products video. Yep. I mean, if we're going to be late for WAN, we might as well both be late for WAN. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. What were the challenges with you returning? I i don't know what were the challenges with with you returning i genuinely

Starting point is 02:11:27 don't know i think the biggest challenge with bringing luke back on camera is that compared to when he used to be on camera he has a lot of work to do now oh yeah like i don't have the time to do it consistently there's no way yeah I'm excited about game links because the prospect of being able to just like, and tech linked and stuff like that, where I can just show up on set, do it really quickly and then leave and go back to what I'm doing is like a lot more feasible than even go through

Starting point is 02:11:56 the whole process for like an LTD video or something. And that kind of worked in this scenario that we're talking about with the cleaning products video, because like you said, I was just waiting for when anyways so my my work was pretty ineffective so it was like I can wait over there and like clean some stuff so it just worked I don't know yeah I got a lot of stuff to do I don't I can't do videos all the time I enjoy it it's fun but yeah all right cool so the pool company we contracted is GRN Pool and Landscape.

Starting point is 02:12:29 And it has been two years. We checked. It has actually been two years since we got the original documentation and sent a deposit to begin work on our project. At the time, they had pretty good reviews and seemed very knowledgeable and professional. Things were moving along quite quickly when it came to selecting know selecting materials and and design and and all that kind of stuff and we actually ended up starting with pool and awarding them landscaping stuff as well which now we're not doing with them anymore did they do any of that yeah yeah so all the stuff that changed in like the outside so far has been them

Starting point is 02:13:26 so they they do work and this is one of those cases where i i want to i want to give mad props to the on-site workers like all the guys that i've had the pleasure of interacting with have been just solid um and they they seem to, they seem to try. But I think they really, you know, this is my own speculation. I think they really struggle with communication. And so when they do make mistakes, a lot of the time, it's because they just didn't know. So this company has screwed up or just not shown up so many things. Um, and some of it's just like, you know, Oh, that could have easily been a misunderstanding. Um, like for example, the, all the tiles, um, this could have been a communication issue. I don't know, but they were all supposed to go one way and instead it goes one way down the sides and tiles um this could have been a communication issue i don't know but they were all supposed to go one way and instead it goes one way down the sides and it goes this way down

Starting point is 02:14:30 the so it looks stupid it's so weird uh they used a different color of grout for like the sandy grout around the pool and the ones on the deck and it's like these are obviously like first world problems. Um, but they, oh my God. Uh, oh, oh yeah, this was, uh, this was, this was a, this was a really good one. Um, our interior contractor, who's a totally different contractor. We're really happy with those guys. Might as well shut them out too. Shermar, um, showed up and was like, Hey, I couldn't help noticing they were digging really close to the house and they've done nothing to support these, these footings for the upper balcony. Yeah, that can't be like that.

Starting point is 02:15:14 And they, you know, had to help us get that fixed. Basically like put these braces on it. The, the, the really, the really bad part, the worst part has been the communication though. Just, yeah, we're coming this day and then they just don't show up. And then we go, hey, where the heck were you? And like, we're coming this other day. Yeah, but that didn't answer my question. Where were you? And looking at Google reviews, it looks like this has become, if it wasn't always a problem and the way that they are conducting their business seems to me to be extremely extremely skeezy where they you know

Starting point is 02:15:54 they say they're gonna do things they don't do things they say they're they're taking deposits to acquire materials those materials take an extremely long time to show up um you just and it's it's just endless you know we you know how we're neighbors with cover star yeah so when we were talking about pool covers we were like oh hey we're neighbors with cover star why don't we go swing by and ask them if they want to do a neighborly discount or if there's anything that we can we can do with them because we're like literally almost next door neighbors you never know right like it never hurts to ask if you ask for the friends and neighbors discount as one of the local uh paint chains they will literally just apply a discount to your order um like it never

Starting point is 02:16:40 hurts to ask and they're like oh yeah well we used to use cover star a lot but these other ones are better and then all these like 18 months later or whatever they're like hey yeah we're getting the sizing done cover star is coming out to measure it and i'm like which is fine i had no problem using cover star but you could have just told me that and then i could have asked them if we could get a friends and neighbors discount yeah um and like you know in in a very early version of the statement of work it's very clear that we wanted in wall stairs uh because i really like in wall stairs i don't like the ladder hanging in yes like harder to clean pain in the butt um and like it wears out feel way more stable yeah i just i just wanted in wall stairs and so you know they sent us a bill for

Starting point is 02:17:24 first of all we noticed they weren't there and then we're like hey they're not there and they sent us a bill for what it would cost to add in wall stairs and send them the thing that's like hey this says in wall stairs and it's been a year and a half so there was some verbal communication in addition to it just being written on the thing and so it's not actually legally binding that they were definitely doing it. But then there's one other Google review where the person also says they asked for in-wall stairs, and then were billed for it later. So maybe this is just a play.

Starting point is 02:17:53 I don't know. But long story short, the challenges are, and you're probably asking, you'd think you guys would have learned, you know, why do you keep working with them? And there's not a lot of pool contractors in the Vancouver area. And particularly for concrete pools, there are even fewer. So you're, you're sort of at the mercy. They, they take deposits, which, you know, yeah, you're right. Maybe we should have stopped giving them deposits, but

Starting point is 02:18:22 we always kept being told, yeah, no, we're going to, we're going to, you know, we're going to get it, you know, we're going to get it done soon. We're so close. We're so close. We are actually extremely close right now. All they have to do, the slab's already outside. All they have to do is put the pool equipment on the slab and cut in the stupid in wall stairs that I asked for. And do the install the cover, and then put on the whatever the material they put over the concrete on the on the inside of the pool is I

Starting point is 02:18:57 forget what it's called. It's like some plaster or something, something like that. And it's like a couple weeks of work. And we've been sitting here with a couple weeks of work left in the project since like march or something like that and it's it's like constantly like this with these guys they finally acknowledge now so this is i guess an improvement since we gave them an ultimatum we were like hey you guys need to show up and start working continuously starting on this day or we're going public with this like it's not the kind of thing we like to do but i this is ridiculous and you you basically um yeah yeah you you earned it um so they finally admitted to us that yes they're pulling people off our job and putting them on other jobs and we're sitting here going no um our project has been pending for two years yeah this, this is the second summer it's going to miss. And the delays have been from you guys, not from us.

Starting point is 02:19:50 These were not our fault. We've always paid promptly, as promptly as we can, given that Yvonne finds all kinds of billing irregularities, because she's Yvonne. And so it takes a ton of time. It has taken an inordinate amount of time for her because there'd be no communication from HQ. So she would have to go every morning and tell them.

Starting point is 02:20:10 She basically had to project manage it when they were doing the landscaping because nobody told anybody anything. So they ended up doing all kinds of dumb stuff like digging up a trench in the wrongs or like they dug up this drain thing that they ultimately had then covered and then had to like dig again retrench it and then Put a new one in because it just like didn't have a drain anymore

Starting point is 02:20:31 allegedly Yeah So I'm extremely frustrated and that's why we haven't been able to do whole room water cooling for the server room because even though Shermar's plumbing guys did a great job of putting in all the all the piping and everything that we needed before the concrete did finally or the shotcrete did ultimately get put in there's nothing there's no pool to act as a thermal mess so you know again I want to be very clear this is a first world problem i get it but also when you pay for something you should probably and you shake hands and you have an agreement

Starting point is 02:21:12 then you should probably get that thing is it is there like special liabilities with making pools or something like is there some reason why you couldn't get a general contractor yeah it's just it's a really specialized type of work. And we did find another pool contractor that's willing to take over the job, which is part of why I'm able to talk about this because like, I was like at their mercy, basically they had my money. And unless I want to take them to court, which I don't think I'm the only person doing at this point. Either I play ball and get a pool or i antagonize them and they just pull everybody off my job and work on something else because they clearly have other work to do right so i'm just sort of sitting here stuck um sorry what was your question again though uh no i just i don't know

Starting point is 02:21:59 yeah searching contractors yeah yeah we found another one that's willing to finish the job. So that's great. But the referral we got for these guys was from like another mom at the school. And she was like, yeah, it took six months and it was pulling teeth. But they did get it done. So it's not a perfect reference. And they won't even look at it, let alone quote it, until we have formally dismissed grn from the job oh which is you know going back to luring you into the computex booth to get you to cover something different yeah a classic contractor move yeah that's brutal um because yeah if their quote

Starting point is 02:22:39 sucks then you know obviously i don't want to go with them. Would you consider if they charged you to come out and quote it? Would that be better? They just won't. They'd charge you like an hourly rate? They're just like, no. No, no, no. But I'm saying like, would that make sense? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:22:53 Because I could understand like them being like, yeah, I don't want to just help you like negotiate a better rate for somebody else. Yeah. Yeah. Rough. Yeah. a better rate for somebody else yeah yeah rough well at least i now know that there won't be swimming at linus's place this summer yeah i've given up we were supposed to be swimming before the end of last summer yeah and i don't think we're gonna swim in 2023 yeah if you're switching contractors and stuff like that yeah i really don't see it happening there isn't that much to do there's like two weeks of work left to do luke theoretically i should be swimming in mid-june i wouldn't be surprised though because if this new contractor comes in they might have liability concerns about the previously existing they're gonna have to go and check a whole bunch

Starting point is 02:23:38 of stuff which i'm sure i'm gonna pay for yep i'm really frustrated yeah Yeah, I think it's going to be rough. Okay. Are there other topics? LTX 2023 update. We are under two months away from LTX 2023. We have sold over 3,500 tickets so far. There are an insane amount of creators. Actually, just naming them all would take a significant period of time.

Starting point is 02:24:02 So I would suggest going to LTxexpo.com slash creators and checking it out yourself. Also volunteer applications are live. Okay, there it is. It's not a link for some reason, but you can sign up to volunteer by visiting ltxexpo.com slash volunteer. Applicants will receive confirmation starting Monday.

Starting point is 02:24:22 Some things that you can do at LTX. There's a PC building workshop sponsored by ASUS where you can learn to build a PC from start to finish. Great for those wanting to know where to start or potentially a fun way to like show a partner or a friend how to do it. There are 20 different stations with workshops happening all throughout the event. There's a Space Cadet Pinball sponsored by Hyte. Eight different stations a Space Cadet Pinball sponsored by Height, eight different stations of Space Cadet Pinball on custom LTX rigs. And there's a high score leaderboard with prizes for the highest scores. There's Racing Sims sponsored by Blackpoint Cyber, seven awesome

Starting point is 02:24:56 Racing Sims with D-Box haptic systems, integrated leaderboard with best laps of the day as well. leaderboard with best laps of the day as well uh there are vr rc cars again take control with our modified cars equipped with an fpv system and steering wheel slash pedal controls is this the same setup as last time but way better nice yeah it's it's no okay it's all new okay way better uh there's a custom race course on the expo floor when he says that last time it was sick so it was sick but it was unreliable we couldn't keep the cars in operation oh it makes so it's it's designed to be a lot more reliable this time cool and there's a 1v1 pyramid what win your way to the top of the variety of classic and modern games. Oh, cool. So there's like a little 1v1 tournament. All right.

Starting point is 02:25:47 Best slash worst of SC, Short Circuit. Love it or hate it, our Short Circuit hosts have picked the best and worst products seen on the channel to look at and experience. DIY Ethernet cable. Learn how to crimp and make your own Cat6A Ethernet cable. Take it a step further and see if you have what it takes to build a cable as fast as possible. Whaleland, sponsored by Ubiquity. Two full days of LAN games and

Starting point is 02:26:10 tournaments and water cooling workshops with Epic Games. Oh, cool. Learn the ins and outs of water cooling from AIOs to custom hardline loops. There's also PC Building Simulator 2 will be featured at the booth if you want to create a virtual loop instead. Get your tickets

Starting point is 02:26:25 today at tickets.ltxexpo.com. I am pretty hyped. I'm really excited. That was a very consistent topic of conversation throughout Computex, talking to other creators. I'll see you at LTX, man. Man, there's so many creators. Tech Tech Potatoes coming. So that's Dr. Ian Cuttriss. Toasty Bros. UFD Tech. Stacey Roy. Taryn's apparently coming. Taryn Van Heemer is on the list.

Starting point is 02:26:53 That's funny. I didn't negotiate all of these necessarily. So some of these I'm finding out for the first time. Snazzy Labs is coming, though. Serve the Home's coming. Sarah Dietschy. Christopher Yee. Pedro from PCMR is coming,

Starting point is 02:27:06 Paul's Hardware, EposVox, ElectroBoom is going to drop by, David Amell from Marquez's team, Craft Computing, Coalition Gaming, Chris Titus Tech, this is just... Brandon Wiley is coming too. Oh, that's awesome. That makes sense.

Starting point is 02:27:22 AntVenom's coming. Man, there are so... Derbauer's coming. Hardware Connects. Eber from Hardware Connects is coming. Greg Salazar. Jay's Two Cents. Actually too many to name them all. Again, I would suggest checking out the creator's page because it's actually going to be nuts.

Starting point is 02:27:37 Yeah. Strange Parts. This is awesome. Hey! Hey! Oh, crap. I'm an idiot. I always forget if his name is Corey or Kerry, but the fox who really specializes in handhelds

Starting point is 02:27:52 and has been just killing it lately. Killing it. Like, look at this view-to-subscriber ratio. 76,000 subscribers, but regularly doing 20,000 to views a video getting more views than your subscriber count is pretty sick that always means you you did a you did a banger yeah you did a banger theo joe theo joe making an appearance love it okay what are we supposed to do now, Dan? I'm lost without our cue cards. Yeah, I forgot to mail them to you.

Starting point is 02:28:30 Well, let's see. We technically have another 10 minutes until WAN after dark, but we do have a hell of a lot of merch messages. So, WAN in the morning? Really? I'm surprised there's that many merch messages. There's a lot of really good questions today oh well there's not yeah there is actually quite a few way to go luke um okay well my face wow i mean it's it's been a lot worse you're basically an abuser oh my goodness oh my gosh luke the doc wasn't done when we were looking at this there's like huge stuff in here that we haven't talked about yet um thanks riley adding all this stuff that we absolutely have to talk

Starting point is 02:29:21 about okay where are we at where are we at where are we at? Where are we at? Where are we at? Diablo 4 developers do a Q&A with fake slash softball fan questions. This is extremely not surprising. This is amazing. Yeah. Okay. Games Radar's Future Games Show interviewed the art director

Starting point is 02:29:38 and associate game director of Diablo 4 asking fan questions like, the cut scenes in D4 are gorgeous. How important was it to get these as high quality as they are in the game? Twitter user PhilTacular looked up the social handles of the fans

Starting point is 02:29:56 who submitted the questions, and they were a mixture of inactive accounts made years ago or extremely recently. Okay, to be fair, that might be fine. Yeah, it might be people that just have throwaway Twitter accounts. But also it wouldn't have been all of them.

Starting point is 02:30:13 For sure. When asked for comment, Blizzard said they were not involved in the process of gathering questions. After much discourse, the future game show posted an update via a comment on the original interview saying, we messed up in quotes. Basically, they claim many of the questions were legit, but the social handles were randomly generated to protect the original

Starting point is 02:30:36 one for originally randomly generated, but they landed on actual handles. Cool. What? I'm sure that's against at least someone's terms of service. That's weird. Okay. Moving on. We've got to talk about this one because it was actually called out at the beginning. Dolphin Steam launch postponed. The Dolphin

Starting point is 02:31:00 emulator team has announced that its planned Steam release has been indefinitely postponed following a letter written from Nintendo to Valve citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which is kind of rough. Making matters worse, Valve confirmed that they reached out to Nintendo first, presumably because they knew that as a platform hosting Dolphin, Valve would be... That makes matters worse? That's just not surprising at all. Valve would be in the crosshairs of Nintendo's lawyers, obviously. Yeah, that makes sense that they would have done that. As Dolphin had not been released on Steam,

Starting point is 02:31:34 the letter is more of a shot across the bow, warning Valve that the emulator's release would violate the DMCA. Would it, though? Okay, well, here, sure. This is, I guess, the argument. Dolphin's code contains the Wii common key. Yeah, that sounds like a... Nintendo's

Starting point is 02:31:53 proprietary code for decrypting Wii games, which is a 39-digit number that is well-known, so I won't paste it here, says our writer. But having that in the thing, like that does actually make sense as to something that you could go after, even if it is commonly known or whatever.

Starting point is 02:32:12 Some other emulators require the game files to host such keys instead, which is arguably legally safer. Not that we know anything, allegedly this is not legal advice, etc, etc, etc. Several lawyers have confirmed to Ars Technica that Nintendo could have a strong case

Starting point is 02:32:29 should it come to a lawsuit because the inclusion of that key. Yeah, exactly. A spokesperson for Nintendo said, Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation. Discussion question. Nintendo being an asshole is one thing,

Starting point is 02:32:47 but is there anything else Valve could have done other than poke the bear? I don't think so. No, I mean, they were going to be... Valve is no stranger to lawsuits at their scale. I mean, we talked about this recently. What was it? The rumble on the Steam Deck or something like that

Starting point is 02:33:05 has some patent troll coming after them right now. Yeah. As much as I have pointed at Valve in the past and been not happy, this was very reasonable of them to do. Yeah. As for whether using emulators, which, by the way, are not illegal in Nintendo, as for whether that ultimately stifles innovation,

Starting point is 02:33:28 I would say that playing Tears of the Kingdom at 4K 60fps with improved visual fidelity is innovation, and your crappy hardware stifles innovation. This can go both ways. Boom. Got him. Yeah. Got him. Got him. Speaking of stifling innovation, did you see

Starting point is 02:33:51 the Reddit API pricing conversation? Can I help you with this? What the hell, man? Do you not even do this, bro? Oh, I actually like the separation. It helps my brain. Alright, well, I'm sorry I broke your brain then. No, it's fine.

Starting point is 02:34:07 Not the first time. Yeah. Christian Selig, the developer of the popular Apollo iOS app for Reddit, says that Reddit wants $12,000 per 50 million requests. And this is a quote here. Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about $1.7 million a month. The average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 a month.

Starting point is 02:34:39 That means even with only subscription users, the app would be unable to break even. Imgur apparently charges Apollo $166 for the same number of requests. That is literally almost an order of, no, oh wow, almost two orders of magnitude less. Twitter, of course, kicked off the trend of expensive API access to social platforms with its lowest tier offering only 10,000 requests for $100. Twitter has subsequently been abandoned as a data source by many academics and the future of many long-term projects is unclear, such as Botto, which assesses how likely an account is to be a bot, and whose work was actually cited in Elon Musk's fight to not buy Twitter. Yeah, this sucks. People are asking who would pay that for Reddit's API, though. I think that's the point.

Starting point is 02:35:42 The point is that these platforms are getting scraped by AI companies and not getting any of the money that is getting dumped into AI right now. And they're sitting there going, well, if we kill a bunch of research projects and we kill a bunch of community favorite third party apps in the process, I guess that's totally worth it because we'll definitely still be popular platforms that will definitely still be valuable for these AI companies to scrape. And we're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen in that regard, but it's not surprising at all to me. It sucks. There's a fair bit more information that I've been reading about this that's not in our notes here necessarily, but Christian, the Apollo developer,

Starting point is 02:36:39 sort of broke down from Reddit's public financial statements, how much each of those calls has to cost them. And basically they're so far beyond just, you know, well, you know, the Reddit app has ads that help support us and we're not getting that from your third party app and we need to find a way to make this, you know, sustainable. Like, like they're so far beyond just we need to be sustainable this is just a blatant cash grab yeah according to his math someone in the full clean chest of the google maps api is less than 900 for 500 000 calls for comparison yeah i i said this with the twitter one too the goal here is not to make it affordable or to make it make sense.

Starting point is 02:37:26 The goal here is to crush third-party apps. Yeah. Like, yeah. And given how unpopular the first-party Reddit app is, I got to wonder what this means for Reddit. Like, no one's safe. Where's Slashdot today? Where's Dig? this means for reddit like will no one's safe where's slash dot today where's dig i do agree with that but i feel like we've been in a actually surprisingly long period of internet stagnation yeah but it's like that article i sent you before the inshittification of everything

Starting point is 02:37:58 yeah and i think the reason that everything is coming to a head right now is because we also went through a period of basically unrestricted money hose flowing into technology into into web however many point o companies right yeah and so now that that now that that spigot is getting turned off and it's all going into AI or it's going into, uh, you know, finding new ways to make housing unaffordable for regular people. Um,

Starting point is 02:38:33 I think we're seeing these companies pivot to, Hey, we, we just need to like make money to please our shareholders, right? We, we can't just be in this, in this growth phase.

Starting point is 02:38:44 We can't be in a pleasing the user phase anymore. And even if, because I know some people are gonna sniff at that and be like, oh yeah, but no companies are gonna pay this API fee. That might be true. I don't think they're necessarily expecting to make money off of this. But I do think a significant effort is being put to

Starting point is 02:39:03 hamper how much other people are able to make money off of your stuff yeah yeah just just putting up walls like no if if someone is using twitter we want them using twitter through our own means if someone is using reddit we want them using reddit through our own means etc yeah yeah someone in full plane chat run john said my reddit account is 15 years old I'll be leaving once they killed third-party apps to be completely honest that'll probably be good for you anyways hey iOS says the first-party reddit app makes thousands of tracking calls to the web that my pie hole went nuts blocking and blew the log files up to gigabytes

Starting point is 02:39:41 so yeah there are reasons There are reasons they want you using the first-party tools, and they're not always user-friendly reasons. Oh yeah, they rarely are. And just stop using it. Is your life actually enriched by using Reddit? Maybe, but probably not as much as it used to be.

Starting point is 02:39:59 Reddit's a really good resource for like, how do I fix this problem? Reddit. I don't know if I'm just being cynical here maybe I am or pessimistic or whatever but I think most people doing scroll instead of gather information in that way I have found that a more effective Google search for a while has been the same Google search that you would normally do and then you append write it on the end yeah that's kind of unfortunate. It just shows Google going down the hole to be honest.

Starting point is 02:40:27 But if you use it in that way, that's kind of its own thing. And if you use it in that way, you don't really need the app either. If we're being honest. Oh, I don't use the app. Yeah. I just, whatever.

Starting point is 02:40:41 I actually have just like a muscle memory, there's no way to get rid of the notification as far as I can tell on mobile when I'm just on the web. Because I can't find, for what I do on Reddit, I can't find any reason to use an app instead of just using my browser. I can't think of one. All I want to do is read things from time to time and post even more occasionally um and so it prompts me like every time i load the site that is better in the app you want to use the app no no not really i don't even i don't it bothered me for a long time and it definitely

Starting point is 02:41:19 hasn't gone away but it doesn't bother me anymore because i just, no, no, no, I think I'm good actually. Yeah, someone in Flowplane chat, my husband absolutely doom scrolls. He doesn't learn anything useful 99% of the time. Yeah, I think that is the standard approach to using Reddit, to be completely honest. Like, I think most people that usedit could benefit very significantly from using it way less um but that isn't saying that reddit is useless i find it very very useful for like information um yeah a lot of times when i do that google search and i append reddit reddit is like actually the best source and i do it because i have done it without reddit at the end and found

Starting point is 02:42:04 nothing useful and then done it with reddit at the end and then finding very good answers from Guys I don't know if you can hear me. I can't hear you at the moment. Hello? Oh man. Sorry chat, hold on a second. Tap tap tap. I don't want to ad-lib everything. Not my kanji. Well I guess it's just... it's just me now. Am I... I'm not sure I'm sending to them either. It's very strange. Unmute.

Starting point is 02:43:43 go ahead and restart this browser tab. I hope you enjoy seeing the thing that I put up. And there we go. Join. Hello? Are you there? Hello. Hi, Dan. Hello. Oh, he disconnected. Oh. I did notice there was only one person in call, but I thought it maybe didn't show yourself.

Starting point is 02:44:09 I was showing that I was still connected. I could still see your camera feed because your camera feed is fed directly from your call, but I think we lost audio. Okay, cool. We're back. Are we back? Not my fault.

Starting point is 02:44:20 Goodbye. Well, it's not my fault. I think it might be. It must be Luke's fault. Goodbye. Well, it's not my fault. I think it might be. Must be Luke's fault. Maybe. By proxy, it's Luke's fault. Yeah, I'm down. Oh, that's true.

Starting point is 02:44:34 I mean, Pooh rolls down a hill, so... Yep. Up a hill. Pooh rolls up a hill. Management is to blame when someone does something wrong. Does that mean... Pooh rolls off the hill? It's you but me. I'm not anymore.

Starting point is 02:44:48 Or wait, it's not July 1st yet. Yeah, get over it. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's my fault. Yeah, it's Linus' fault. He got him. I want to give you guys a little update on the eating disorder helpline chatbot that we talked about previously. They have paused their plan to switch from human staff and volunteers to a chat

Starting point is 02:45:06 bot. That's probably good. After users found that it was easy to prompt the bot into recommending calorie restriction, food avoidance, and frequent weigh-ins, even after the user said the doctor advised them against dieting due to their eating disorder. I mean, the weight loss advice was broadly accurate, but the bot lacked the ability of a human to guide the conversation and simply reflected users' preoccupations back at them, potentially reinforcing anorexia and bulimia. When posts about this issue drew attention online, Nida's communications and marketing vice president commented on at least one post, calling it a flat-out lie. But then the next day, the chatbot was taken down. They described the issue as a bug, thanking the community members who brought this to their attention. That's a bit of a pivot.

Starting point is 02:45:54 That's a flat-out lie. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I know that this wasn't an AI chatbot. So it's not really on topic in terms of the AI revolution that we're undergoing right now or bubble or whatever technology. Yeah. Um, however, it does raise some interesting questions about what it's going to look like

Starting point is 02:46:19 when someone inevitably does do this with an AI chatbot. And so I'm glad we talked about it. I'm glad we have an update for you guys. And I'm glad that we can move on to talk about the MetaQuest 3. Coming this fall, $4.99. Have you seen pictures? Just in this dock, actually. It is 40% slimmer with full color pass-through, higher resolution, better controllers,

Starting point is 02:46:47 and the Quest 2 is getting a price drop to $299 for 128 gigs on June 4. That's right, a price drop from... So, wait, is it... Tell me something. Okay, hold on. Let's just play a little game drop okay what about this oh oh fake what about this is that is that toss is that a drop a price toss a price start calling

Starting point is 02:47:20 like uh amazon sales price tosses. Yeah. It's extremely loud. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Dan. Sorry, everyone. That's okay. But good demo. Was it at least funny? It was pretty good.

Starting point is 02:47:35 Okay, cool. So it's back down to the regular price and just in time for Apple's headset on Monday. Let's go. That I am much more interested in just saying. I've had some interesting debates with people about this i i had my first dinner with a billionaire i'm not going to name them but uh very very interesting person i wonder uh super smart um what you wonder yeah there's only like a set amount of was it at computex don't worry about it. Okay. Anyway, the point is, super nice, super smart, shockingly engaged in like, the business for someone who realistically doesn't have to anymore.

Starting point is 02:48:15 And we had a really cool conversation about Apple, where they basically were like, yeah, Apple's really great. And I was like, yeah, Apple's really great until you like get into their sort of hypocrisy and the way they treat their users. Like, oh, you want to update the firmware on that product you bought? Oh, you haven't bought enough of our products. Ooh. Oh, that's too bad. And, you know, go borrow someone else's. Yeah. Some of their business that they are quite invested in, you know, I'm going to keep things very vague so that it's really difficult to pin this down. But some of their business that they are quite invested in, you know, I'm going to keep things very vague so that it's really difficult to pin this down. Uh, but some of their business that they're invested in, uh, has, it takes a very principled approach to, to product development and, and to billing for

Starting point is 02:48:56 their customers. And, you know, I really respect that. And so, um, you know, I, I, uh, I felt like I wasn't just talking to someone who's like, well, of course, Apple should do that. They should just make more money. Like it was it was really great conversation. And we steered back towards Apple later on in the conversation because they sort of asked me to to speculate on Apple's VR headset. I kind of went, look, I know that this sort of flies in the face of everything I just said about Apple, because I said a bunch of negative stuff. But that doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the positive that they do. And that doesn't mean that I don't respect a lot of what they do and their and their technological innovation and all that. And I think if anyone's

Starting point is 02:49:36 going to do this, I think it's Apple. And I think they're gonna I think they're gonna follow a really similar playbook to the one that I recognized with the Apple Watch. And it wasn't the first time they'd done this, but it was the first time that I was red-pilled enough to figure out what it was that they were doing. Do you remember what went down with... Red-pilled enough? Yeah. What? Just like, you know, reality aware enough whoa okay uh i i know that it has

Starting point is 02:50:12 like stupid like negative connotations or whatever but i'm i refuse to i refuse to see it you're going to like movie i'm going with movie reference the matrix yeah yeah so um so do you remember what they did with the apple watch they didn't they just like wait observe other people doing it wrong and then do it themselves well yeah they did standard they did that to a degree but they released the apple watch right as long as it's not the little blue pills Linus what's wrong with that I mean you know things happen okay you want to please your partner right you need a little bit of help nothing wrong with that it's not life isn't about holding each other down okay sometimes it's about lifting things up any who what they did with the Apple Watch was they released it as the Apple Watch.

Starting point is 02:51:06 And then when the next generation product came out, all of a sudden it was like Apple Watch Series 1 or something like that. Like, remember the branding was kind of funny around it? And what they did is they retroactively like retconned the Apple Watch being the apple watch and they changed the name to series zero and then like really quickly software support for it like kind of went like it wasn't getting the latest features and it got kind of i knew about that yeah it got kind of like b-tier long-term software support and was sort of, was sort of treated as, was sort of treated as like a, a, a, a lesser product. It kind of, it kind of went away.

Starting point is 02:51:51 And what I figured out at that time was, Oh, this is the Apple version of a dev kit. They just, it's like minimum viable product. It's, yeah, that makes sense. It's, it's acceptable enough. And, um, you know, as long as we, and, and, and the hardware is like underpowered, it's slow and it's crappy, but we're just going to kind of like support it for as long as we kind of have to. And the new ones are so much better that most people probably upgrade anyway and hope they didn't buy the gold one and and and it just kind of quietly went away and it wasn't until later that i realized that

Starting point is 02:52:33 oh apparently series zero was an unofficial name they just called it apple watch first generation and they released a series one that was an upgraded version of the original. Okay, so there. That was the funky branding. So that's why people called it the Series 0, because the first one just sucked. It basically got treated like an experiment. And it's not the first time they did that. The iPad is actually another classic example.

Starting point is 02:53:01 The first generation iPad was so much worse than the next generation iPad. It was way slower. It was fatter. The battery life sucked. It was so much worse that I forget what the exact numbers are, but I think it ended up getting software support for something like half the amount of time compared to the iPad 2, which was back when Apple had sensible product naming schemes for at least some things. iPad, iPad 2, simple, right? Anyway. And so this is kind of a thing they do. The first generation iPhone sucked. It didn't even have 3G support, right? Like it sucked. It was essentially a dev kit. And I think you could make that argument pretty solidly for all three of those products.

Starting point is 02:53:52 You could iterate off of that first one very quickly, though. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. So I was looking at this. I'm looking at all the... Oh, my. Yeah, this is not a very good connector um so i'm looking at all of the uh the indications for the upcoming apple apple vr mixed reality whatever we want to call the

Starting point is 02:54:15 upcoming apple headset and it's like yeah it's probably basically not going to do anything out of the gate and this technology is super immature and it's probably gonna kind of suck and my initial like knee-jerk reaction is oh it's not very Apple like to you know it's something that sucks but yeah I hear you now but it's actually very Apple like they just also replace it really quickly exactly so they released the first generation product to the public as a dev kit. But instead of charging dev kit like pricing, they charge retail like pricing. And no, no, dev kits are typically more. I mean, they charge like, okay, consumer pricing, and consumers can buy it if

Starting point is 02:54:58 they want to be part of the experience and live on the bleeding edge. But understand that this thing is probably going to go away in terms of software support because devs are going to come up with really amazing things that you can do with the Apple headset. And Apple's going to build new capabilities into that next headset. They're going to iterate fast and you're going to get left behind. And as long as it doesn't cost too much money, I guess that's okay. Or maybe if it does cost too much money, I guess that's okay. Or maybe if it does cost too much money, I guess that's okay too because you like giving Apple your money.

Starting point is 02:55:29 I don't think the iPhone really got good until the iPhone 4. And maybe that's partly just personal bias because that's when I bought an iPhone. But that was the first time I felt compelled to own one. I think the iPhone 3G was still a pretty massive paradigm shift. That's fair. It felt extremely cheap and crappy.

Starting point is 02:55:50 I don't know if I would say if it was good yet. But it was still like... That was still the big moment, I think. In my opinion. A 3GS wasn't bad, people are saying. Because that one was a lot faster like a lot faster um i never had any of them so i don't know

Starting point is 02:56:20 is lmg invited to WWDC? No. Apple and I have no longer been friends on Facebook for a long time. We were never friends on Facebook. Friendship, friendship. Not ended with Apple. Yeah, friendship never started. Apple's one of those companies that you have to play the game. You have to cover them the way they want to be covered. And my understanding is Mac address actually has a relationship with Apple now.

Starting point is 02:56:52 But the second I found out about that, I went, cool, I'm not going to be involved at all. Probably good. Which, yeah, is almost certainly for the best. Which is almost certainly for the best. I think they need to just do their thing and not let me talk to Apple at all because I would almost certainly say something that's not Apple friendly. Okay, so yes, but even outside of that,

Starting point is 02:57:16 just like the association, like if they just treat Mac address like its own encapsulated thing. Well, they know that Mac address is under the LNG umbrella. It's not a secret. No, for sure. But we actually, we talked about that when we were starting the channel was we we had like serious internal discussions do we stealthily

Starting point is 02:57:34 make this thing completely separate um knowing that that could facilitate building a relationship with apple um but could blow up in our face when people figure out later that it was part of the LMG umbrella? Or do we just own that it's part of LMG upfront, be transparent, even if it costs us every building that relationship. So we just have to like, buy samples and do videos later forever, because we'll never get, you know, a reviewer relationship, we'll never get our questions answered um knowing also though that the benefit will be that we can grow the channel faster there's all these pros and cons and ultimately we went with we went with transparency um i just don't like i don't like drama i just don't need it in my life and it's a lot easier to just

Starting point is 02:58:19 be up front with people yeah which again like makes it that much more triggering for me when i see conspiracy theories about how i'm accepting you know under the table sponsorships from doing this from doing that net if i was doing any of that stuff like look at the kind of turnover there is in the tech industry you think someone would have talked at some point like about how much under the table money i took. Whatever. I think we should hit up merch messages. Let's hit up some merch messages. We're at over three hours for the runtime. What? Yeah, I said you had 10

Starting point is 02:58:53 minutes left and then you did like 14 more topics. I want to go to lunch with Dr. Cutress after when? If I can bring Wendell. Yeah, sure. Because I was planning on going with Wendell. But meeting up with Dr. Cutress? After when? If I can bring Wendell. Yeah, sure. Because I was planning on going with Wendell. But meeting up with Dr. Cutress would be fantastic. I haven't seen him this whole show.

Starting point is 02:59:11 Yeah, let's go. Sweet. Man, now I'm looking forward to lunch. Yeah, me too. Okay, we're going to do these merch messages pretty fast here. Hey, Andy, should we turn off the light? Are we turning off the light? Merch messages after dark? I mean, let's see how much of an effect it has I kind of feel like not much I could just

Starting point is 02:59:31 Take down the grade That's probably too dark does that have a does that have a fade on it at all Don't step into that light that's how you know you're dead sure yeah we'll call that one show after dark yeah it's noon it's pretty late all right guys in the afternoon now um okay let's get into it morning merch messages morning merch messages. Morning merch messages. Good morning merch messages. Hi, peeps. In retrospect to reviews like the Ally one

Starting point is 03:00:12 that come out way before the actual release date, would it be fair to make the review closer to the release date as things may change? That's a really good question. And I think this was probably prompted by Dave2D's video on the Ally, where the title was basically, Don't Trust Other Reviews of the ROG Ally, and kind of talks about covering the product later. I, um, you know, I like Dave. I've, I've met Dave before and honestly, there's no real way for me to sugarcoat this though. I think that's a shockingly bad take. You, you, you, you cover a product when the manufacturer says it's done and to, to not cover it at that point. Like you can make your decision to, to,

Starting point is 03:01:06 to, to not cover it because you think it's not in a good enough state or whatever else. Uh, but at the end of the day to say that another media publication did anything wrong, um, or that,

Starting point is 03:01:31 wrong um or that or that readers and viewers shouldn't trust another review because it was it was done at an earlier stage in the product's lifetime is sort of puzzling to me um like i i think there is an absolute benefit to covering products over their lifespan. So I don't disagree with that. I think that's really good. But at the end of the day, we can only cover what we're given. And when the manufacturer says, hey, this is prime time, we're not in a position to say, no, we disagree that it's prime time. We're going to cover it when it's like more prime timer.

Starting point is 03:02:11 Our job is to say, you know, hey, this is the day that pre-orders are going up. And this is the state of this product because Asus might fix it more or they might not. And if they don't, you need to understand exactly what it is you're buying they said it was done and so if they think it's done then as far as i'm concerned they could stop development tomorrow they probably won't um but they could and so you have to you have to cover things as they are rather rather than covering them as they will be you can acknowledge what they might be you can talk about what the brand says they might do but no you've got a yeah you Got to, yeah, you got to. Next up.

Starting point is 03:03:19 I forget what the actual question was. Why don't you review it? I'm reviewing it closer to the release date. Yeah, no. No, we should review it when AS the release date? Yeah, no. We should review it when ASUS asks for pre-order money. They're asking for your money. As far as I'm concerned, the second a brand is asking for your money, we need to take a close look at exactly what you're getting for it. And then if that changes over time, hey, that's great.

Starting point is 03:03:43 I mean, Valve's done a great job of that with the steam deck but we can't take it for granted and if other publications cover it closer to the availability date a month after the availability date six months after the availability date i hope check them out yeah check it out we had this conversation earlier in the show we don't all have to say the same thing you don't like yes it's not of particular benefit to you for like every single reviewer to release identical videos all at the exact same minute like just whatever yes game linked is real lakeways and floatplane chat go subscribe okay up next is from david what is the most interesting thing you saw at Computex that you thought wouldn't make a good video? Oh, that's a really good question.

Starting point is 03:04:37 That's a very good question. I like this one a lot, yeah. Because you've got two brains, don't you? Wow, this thing's cool. Nobody cares. Yeah. That happens to me a lot at these type of shows but i wasn't on the show for so this is all minus holy crap um okay yeah i uh i swung by like the usb if booth um and they had just like USB IF booth. And they had just like vendor showcases of, of,

Starting point is 03:05:07 of cool tech that's coming. And they, they had, I think it was either a live demo or it was just some information on like USB 80 gig, like 80 gigabit. And I was like, wow.

Starting point is 03:05:21 See you later. That booth is always fun to go by. Yeah. And never worth making a video yeah but like yeah absolutely every time it's here it's cool and they're here every time so man there's i love going through there's like i wasn't there this year so i'm going to describe it poorly but there's one side of the hall which is like more consumer focused stuff then there's the other side of the hall, which is like, you know, the companies that actually make the things that a lot of the other brands are branding.

Starting point is 03:05:49 Going through that section is very interesting. Yeah. I think we did a video on that one year, actually. MSI makes a car charger, apparently, in some markets. That's random. So I was like, okay. And oh, I dropped by this company that makes switches with screens on them. And it's for,

Starting point is 03:06:08 it's for like aviation consoles and stuff like that. And it, so not like key switches, not for like a keyboard. Well, they are, but not for a keyboard, but like for,

Starting point is 03:06:19 for like a giant dashboard, you know? Uh, I was like, wow, super cool see you later yeah what else man

Starting point is 03:06:31 that's that's that's like not video worthy Supermicro had a really cool liquid cooled server in fact there's a ton of immersion and conventional liquid cooling server stuff. There's a lot of stuff that shows like this

Starting point is 03:06:48 that seven to ten years ago, we probably would have made a bunch of videos about. But at this point, especially with how YouTube is doing things, if those videos aren't just like bangers, it can hurt the channel.

Starting point is 03:07:04 So you gotta be careful. Yeah. Okay. Hit me. Okay. Speaking of hurting the channel, Linus,

Starting point is 03:07:11 in the event of your death, who would you want to sponsor your funeral? And how would the segue go? I would expect it to be D-brand. I would hope it was D-brand as well. Yeah. That's like. If my,

Starting point is 03:07:21 if my, if my coffin didn't have like a damascus vinyl skin on it i'd be extremely disappointed you have to your coffin and your car have to match yeah oh i'm crying with tears of laughter to the you get driven to it in a hearse that is also wrapped well yeah they could well no no it would they it wouldn't need to be a hearse. They could just get the longer Taycan. Rip out the back seats and throw me in there. I'm thinking of that. You wouldn't even need to rip out the back seats. I'm not that tall.

Starting point is 03:07:52 Just stuff me in the trunk. Oh, boy. Yeah, so actually, you know what? You have a bond to a speech. It's just a segue to a sponsor. Yeah, I'm going to ask for a commitment right now, actually. Oh, no. A message.

Starting point is 03:08:15 I'm live on the WAN show right now, and I need you to commit to sponsoring my funeral if I die. Period. I expect the coffin to be wrapped in whatever your gaudiest, tackiest pattern is. Okay. I will... He literally just said that to D-Rand.

Starting point is 03:08:35 I will let you guys know. I'll let you know what they say assuming they get back to me in a timely manner here. I think I'm crying. Oh, fuck. Oh, Josh. Oh, Josh. Okay. say assuming they get back to me in a in a timely manner here i think you're crying oh fuck oh joyce okay uh hey ltd team linus luke i have a question re-watching the office moving vlogs in them uh linus keeps referring to having to move and inspectors making sure you are moved out. Did anyone kick you out? Yes. Yeah. See, you see, we had a certain caretaker for the property that never did anything. And so the neighbors got mad about the state of the

Starting point is 03:09:17 property and started poking around and realized we were running a commercial entity there. The good news is by the time this whole thing came to a head, we were already planning to move anyway. So when the city came and said, hey, you guys need to move or we're going to start finding you like thousands of dollars a day. We were like, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on. The only reason that we haven't moved yet is because of like city permitting issues. So like, can we chill? Can we work together to get us out of here? It was never supposed to grow this big.

Starting point is 03:09:52 It was supposed to be small and everything was fine. Yeah. And they were like, okay. So we got that all, we got that all sorted out out but it did mean that we had to get in there a little bit sooner than the building was actually ready because our other contractor who we've worked with a few times and are mostly fairly pretty good okay pretty okay pretty good uh martini construction um they were experiencing some delays at that time. Overall, shout out Shermar.

Starting point is 03:10:33 Pretty shout out martini. They're pretty okay. Not shout out GRN Pool and Landscape. That's where I'm at. Hey guys, from recent coverage, you clearly have a great relationship with reps from tech companies as previously unshared stories of reps just coming through and helping you out big time. Oh, I mean, it's endless, right? How could we do anything that we do without help from these passionate people at these companies that you know just want

Starting point is 03:11:05 people to to see and enjoy their products right like it's i i know it sounds really cheesy when i say it like that but there is no there is no wizard hiding in the side room there is no scooby-doo aha that like really is it for a lot of people who work in the tech industry and it's one of the reasons that like compensation in the tech industry kind of sucks because people are so passionate about it they just like really want to build cool tech products um and that's a shame but it's also really cool that everyone's so passionate so i don't know what to tell you um you know i want everyone to be compensated fairly but I also want to work with people

Starting point is 03:11:48 who are super passionate and I think there are some employers that will always try to leverage that, right? Was there anything that made you personally excited that won't make its way into a video and what was it? I think we just did that yeah i think this is more excited i mean i wasn't excited by the switch no this i think this is more general than uh than computex

Starting point is 03:12:15 and computex yeah i think it was computex okay um moving on then well i mean i was still thinking oh okay sorry made me excited but won't make its way into a video Moving on then. Well, I mean, I was still thinking. Oh, okay, sorry. Made me excited but won't make its way into a video. Never mind, I'm over it. Do you see the opportunity for a PhysX-like add-in card for AI with games moving forward? No? No. I don't think we're going to use our we're going to use our gpus for ai we've

Starting point is 03:12:45 already the the the the time for more add-in cards i think is past and the time of of tightly integrated chips is now old man yeah hi lld been watching since 2011 what did you think about the modded 3070 with 60 gigs of 16 gigs of ram and what do you guys think that nvidia will do with the companies behind those mods great job nvidia will ignore it and what do i think about it i think it's super cool and i'm really frustrated because we actually had the idea of modding additional VRAM on GPUs and testing them years ago. And I asked Gary, who now works for us but previously worked at Asus, if he could facilitate getting us access to the gear

Starting point is 03:13:36 that we would need to do something like that, or at the very least recommending what gear we would need to do it. And he was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Boom! Other people did it. So thanks, Gary. would need to do it and he was like yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes boom other people did it so thanks gary love you everyone's doing it oh well you still have to you still have a chance to miss it by another couple years love you all first purchase buying abc for a dear friend's new baby. With Yvonne being the behind-the-scenes superstar she is, what are some of the ways she enjoys feeling celebrated? Your dynamic is inspiring.

Starting point is 03:14:14 She... You name companies after her. She just really appreciates that. No, she doesn't like that. Yvonne Umbrella Court? The problem for Yvonne, I think, is that I appreciate her. I know what she does. But she feels, and in some cases it's not accurate, but in other cases it is,

Starting point is 03:14:35 she feels like other people don't necessarily know or appreciate what she does. And so she doesn't want to hear it from me. Like, you know, good job, honey. Here's your quarterly performance review, A a plus like that means nothing to her. You know, what she what she enjoys is being appreciated by the people at work or by by partners or by like, like, I know there there are, there's at least one member of one of our families i'm keeping this as vague as i can um not that it'll make a difference because you know i guess you might know who you are that just doesn't seem to understand that she doesn't just hang out at her husband's business

Starting point is 03:15:18 all day you know like i remember a comment was made at some point, like three years after our last kid was born. It was like, so are you ever going to go back to work? And she's like, what you mean in the pharmacy? You understand that I am at work, right? That I never stopped working, really. How many times do I have to tell you that I work for our company? Uh, like it just, yeah, it's just, it's just rude, right? Like it's ridiculous. Um, you know, I think that, you know, for her it's, it's the, there are things that I can do. Like she appreciates it when I

Starting point is 03:16:02 notice just, you know, casual misogyny. And that's not a word that I throw around, right? Like, I think that misogyny has come to mean just anything at this point. I think it's, it's, it's a lost a lot of its original meaning, because now all of a sudden, everything is misogyny. And it's, it's not not um but there but there are things that are you know like the way that uh you know a contractor will come to the door and i'll answer the door and they'll ask a bunch of questions and i'll be like yeah i actually don't know um my wife knows that give me a second i'll go get her and then i'll stand there and they'll keep talking to me even though she so she's talking to them but they're looking at me.

Starting point is 03:16:46 They face you. Yeah. My girlfriend is buying a car and she's in the car with me. She's asking the questions and the dude is looking at her while she's asking the question and then looks at me and answers the question. Like, what are you doing? Yeah. So she appreciates it when I notice and just give her a little pat on the back after, like, hey, I noticed and that wasn't cool.

Starting point is 03:17:10 Obviously, we're not going to make a scene about something stupid like that. But like, hey, I felt your pain there or I was aware of it. And it's similar with stuff to do with work as well. Like when, you know, when someone walks up to me and thanks me for throwing a Christmas party when I didn't touch it and Yvonne did all the work and she's standing right there. I'll just be like, hey, they mean thanks to you too. You know, like it's tough, right? I do sometimes refer to you two as a unit. I know. Which I try to...

Starting point is 03:17:55 Try to go the other way with it. I do. Is all I'll say. Yeah, yeah. I like to think that I do better these days than I used to. I'll catch myself sometimes. And like I contribute to the problem too, like I went and named the stupid company after myself which in

Starting point is 03:18:08 retrospect was absolutely a mistake. I wish I called it something else. We tried. It's a lot of paperwork to change it now. Yeah. Like really expensive. Yeah. Moving on? Okay. Hey gang, what in your opinion is the thing oh hold on people are hold on hold on one quick thing people are like well obviously you should just say it was all her right but you gotta understand that it's not that simple for people with that kind of mindset where like only a man could have done anything um and she would say this and i and i would i was like kind of dismissive of it i was like no way but she'd say like no if you do that if you defend me people just assume that it's fake attribution that it's because i told you to do it yeah and then i was

Starting point is 03:18:59 like no way and we did it for a bit and she was right people just have their minds made up they see whatever they want to see they hear whatever they want to hear and i don't mean that universally but some people do and so you just have to kind of go you know yeah i'm sorry that happened i'm not sucked um i know what you did. And yeah. Go ahead. Sorry, Dan. Go ahead. No, that's totally fine.

Starting point is 03:19:29 Hey, gang. What, in your opinion, is the thing the tech community strongly demands or desires that you know will end up being something that everyone will regret wanting? Jeez. What is with these questions? How am I supposed to How am I supposed to do that? I mean I think we could have called it on horse armor What else though?

Starting point is 03:19:59 Do you think like Do you think AI and gaming Is going to be one of those things we regret Regret wanting? No, I think that'll be really cool. What are we going to regret wanting? I mentioned earlier in the show people wanting all the reviewers' opinions to be the same. I don't know if that really fits the spirit of this question, but I would say that.

Starting point is 03:20:23 I know I'm making a big deal about it, but I would say that. I actually like, I know I'm like making a big deal about it, but I think that's extremely bad. And like people need to really crush that immediately. You know what? I like it. Good job. Cool. Got him.

Starting point is 03:20:36 I agree with you. I have exactly the same cake. I do that to him all the time. How is he so good at this? Just in case people didn't get that. Oh, it's maddening. Hi, Linus, Luke, and Dan. Love all the Computex covering from LCT and other outlets this year.

Starting point is 03:20:55 Has there been any tech trend, good or otherwise, from the different vendors that surprised you this year? I didn't expect behind-the- you know hidden connectors to get so much attention it feels like the kind of thing we could have done forever ago and didn't so i i just not not the not the pc community but like connectors on the back of the motherboard is not a new thing no no not at all a new thing to like gaming pcs yeah yeah yeah and uh i'm uh yeah i'm i'm i don't know if i'm excited for it like we definitely need to see some new case designs to really get the most out of it but i'm not not

Starting point is 03:21:33 excited for it definitely it surprised me i yeah i think it's pretty cool um here okay another tech trend i am amazed by the number of companies getting into sim racing tech. Cooler Master showed off a chair. That has been weird, hasn't it? EK showed off this entire $25,000 kit. That was very surprising. EK of all... Yeah, I kept asking people, like, you're sure it was EK?

Starting point is 03:22:02 It wasn't like someone else? How many people are buying, like, you're sure it was EK. It wasn't like someone else. How many people are buying like multi-access? I know there's absolutely a community for it, but like you'd think it would support like two brands total or something. Yeah. Not the amount that are in it. Like it's one of those things where like I know what tooling costs. It costs a lot.

Starting point is 03:22:23 You got to be selling like thousands of something to make it make sense to manufacture it well sort of depending on the price gibram and full plane chat said it really took off with the pandemic so i agree especially like f1 and stuff sim racing at home like the actual professional drivers were doing it on stream and stuff oh my god who was spending that kind of money on this sort of thing also it's sort of over and we're already seeing consumer trends setting back to what they were before i just i don't know i just don't get it like i'm like i'm thinking about the amount of the amount of money i would have to be earning to spend $25,000 on a toy. And part of it. Because you're going to end up investing more.

Starting point is 03:23:15 Or spending, I should be saying. You're going to end up spending more for sure. Because that's like where you start, right? Yeah, and no, the pro drivers are not buying some kit from ek or some chair from cooler master like i just crazy stuff yeah they are getting some consultant to come in and build them like a very custom like d box setup or whatever else right like i just people like it's a hobby like sure what an insane hobby it takes up so much space though like wow i just and yes yes i know they start at much much lower prices for for diy kits i just

Starting point is 03:23:55 it's one of those things it's like uh it's like an alienware laptop in theory these things exist or in theory people are buying them otherwise they wouldn't exist you never see but i've never seen one yeah and and i i have seen an alien wear laptop now i'm talking more like back when i was working at ncix 10 years ago you know alien wear had five thousand six thousand dollar laptops back then and they were obviously i mean even the desktops you know i would look at it and I'd go, Alienware is a brand of computers, obviously. Otherwise they wouldn't have a website,

Starting point is 03:24:30 but I've never seen one. You know, I've never seen an actual gamer gaming on one of these. And so it's the same thing. Like these sim setups, it's the kind of thing we build for spectacle or like Deadmau5 had one. But how many Deadmau5s are there in the world people with the

Starting point is 03:24:46 means the space and the passion for gaming they can't they just can't be that many shraff and floatplane chat says in all caps it's cheaper than actually hobby racing irl it's like, okay. Well, I wouldn't do that either. That sounds really expensive. Exactly. Time consuming. I mean, yeah, I, and I, you know what?

Starting point is 03:25:16 This is one of those things where I think I just have to acknowledge that as not a car enthusiast, I will never be able to put myself into the headspace of a car enthusiast. I mean, I know for a fact that Jake has relatively limited space compared to someone like Deadmau5. And he still feels it's a high enough priority to have a sim racing setup in his computer room.

Starting point is 03:25:41 Same for Ed. We saw this in their extreme tech upgrades. So clearly it's a thing. But like $25,000 EK rig. Yeah, that seems outlandish. Yeah. Next up, we gotta get through these we got we got stuff to get to sorry, sorry. As a gun collector. That's entry level. I will never understand collecting i'm sorry i just don't think i will my favorite comparison you do some collecting sorry you do some collecting sure what do i collect controllers sort of i use them all my controller collection is like nine controllers like they actually are all in my daily yes but they're all in the rotation say

Starting point is 03:26:22 that you didn't buy that Xbox Edition one. The prototype one. Right. Or Project Scarlet, yeah. You do use it. Yeah. But you still bought it in what I would see as a collector approach. Yeah, I guess that's true.

Starting point is 03:26:37 When I said collection, I meant more in terms of like... Okay, when I heard gun collection, I was thinking like, okay, how many guns can one person fire at once my collector my collector my controller collection can all actually be used all at once like playing mage quit i actually just need 10 controllers so if i'm going to have to have 10 controllers why would i buy all the same one i don't consider that a collection i have some very collector-y unique uh item controllers you appreciate unobtainium in things i do which is not it's not 100 the same either and like people are talking about my gold controller i knew you were going to go go there with this but i wouldn't have done that if it wasn't to make a video yeah i wasn't gonna

Starting point is 03:27:29 for that reason i wasn't even yeah um yeah people like to be frank many collectors item guns you shouldn't fire for safety reasons yeah see this yeah this is what i'm talking about um yeah that i don't understand i also don't understand people that buy things with the purpose of leaving them in the box. I've never understood that at all. It's a Schrodinger's item. I need to talk to the community about this. Yeah, I know what you're going to reference.

Starting point is 03:27:56 Yeah. We have a sponsor. I'm not going to name them. You can guess. Are you able to create a poll? We have a sponsor that wants to send us multiple not one but multiple sealed clear or like like color transparent edition n64s to unbox all of them on short circuit and I'm looking at it going I think keep it

Starting point is 03:28:31 simple just should we is it cool or is it bad and I'm looking at this going I think people are gonna be really angry about us breaking the seals on like five transparent and 64s people are already on both sides of this see this is what i don't i don't understand actually in this latest because like what's the point what's the point of leaving in the box i almost think it's worse to leave in the box because then no one gets to enjoy it all you get to enjoy is the external cardboard and you could still enjoy that if you took it out of the box yeah but it's just it's one of those things like i just don't get it from my point of view even though i'm not a collector and i frankly just don't really get it it's like it's like taking some hollow foil

Starting point is 03:29:20 first print char charizard or something and just like ripping them up oh or like folding the corner because you're not you're not ripping it out but you're like haha i made this worth less watch me do it again haha i did it again i don't think that works because you could still play the game with it without doing that but you could still play the well you can't play the N64. Because you could treat it nicely. No one's gonna play TCG with a first edition hollow

Starting point is 03:29:53 foil Charizard. I totally would. You're an idiot. But I wouldn't buy one. And if I had one, I would sell it. Because I don't see the value in it, right? You know I don't think you're an idiot well no because i i would never be in that scenario because other people value it so much more that i would sell it immediately so you're saying if it didn't so you're saying i should take the n64s and i should sell them i mean it was absolutely. Because if it's in my possession and I can't sell it,

Starting point is 03:30:27 like, sure, I'm going to open it. Or if I have this hollow Charizard, but if I sell it, I go to jail. I don't care. I'm not going to just leave it on a shelf that has literally, genuinely zero value to me. I'm also probably not going to play the game with it because I also don't care about that.

Starting point is 03:30:43 But I wouldn't mind, especially if it's in a nice sleeve or whatever. Why do I care? Dbrand responded, we'll send the bill to Yvonne. I think they misunderstood. I want them to pay to sponsor the funeral. Can't tell with these guys sometimes.

Starting point is 03:31:05 All right. The poll seems pretty conclusive that it's cool. You apparently have. But those bads. Are going to be real mad. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 03:31:20 Yeah. Like those are those are some. I pretty much bet you the intensity of voting here is not equal the people that are saying cool are like me they don't care it doesn't matter they're not going to watch a video because you happened to open it you know what i mean the bads are going to be enraged because you happen to open it like these are these are different things like i just don't value something remaining in a box i don't value a car are different things. I just don't value something remaining in a box. I don't value a car that doesn't get driven.

Starting point is 03:31:48 I don't value a console that doesn't get played. I don't care about those things. So you're saying I'm allowed to buy an expensive car. He told me he was worried about my soul or something like that, if I got too like into, you know, just luxury stuff, which is fair.

Starting point is 03:32:09 So, but, but I'm allowed to buy an expensive car, which you don't seem to have a problem with as long as you get to drive it. You also didn't get the other one you were talking about, but if I had two and I can only drive one at once, is that a problem now? Well,

Starting point is 03:32:22 no, it's not because if you drove them at all, because there's people that will acquire a car or the firearm in the previous conversation or a Pokemon card in the previous conversation or a console in this conversation and never, they will leave it in the box. They'll never touch it.

Starting point is 03:32:38 They'll be in like a climate controlled glass thing. Okay. And you're not even allowed within a foot of it. All this type of stuff. Well, what if it was a middle ground? What if I i had two cars a daily driver and one that i only drive on sunday so that i can keep it in good condition at least you drive it at least you drive it okay what if i had seven cars one for every day of the week at least that's literally not so for you it's just black and white for you pretty much you should use the thing so i'm allowed to have a toyota corolla gr then yes yeah i love how excited

Starting point is 03:33:07 that's a sweet car and like really well you'd have to actually drive it though that would be my i would drive it yeah so that thing looks freaking awesome yeah awesome but you you should enjoy it because it's cool to drive like the firearm example like if you had this firearm that you keep in a safe well you should never allowed out. If you shoot it on special occasions, what I mean by the safe is you never even get to see it. But if it's a special occasions thing,

Starting point is 03:33:33 even once a year, as long as it's used, it's like, alright, I don't mind that. It feels notably bad to me to just be like no i'm going to keep this n64 and it's going to stay in a box forever and i don't want it to ever be used i don't want anyone to ever play a game on it i don't want anyone to ever touch it it's translucent which is awesome but it's going to stay in cardboard so never no one will ever see through

Starting point is 03:34:02 this translucent plastic like what ah that, that's rough to me. I actively don't like that. But the amount that I actively don't like that is very small. And the amount that people don't like it when you open those things is very big. Yeah. Everyone wants me to get the GR. Yes, please. It's a sweet car.

Starting point is 03:34:22 Ah, I've been so close, like, twice. And it just feels really stupid because i can only drive one car at once i don't think you should actually but then my tycan's been in the shop for like almost six weeks what if you sell the tycan and get the gr i'm not going to go back to going to gas stations all the time honestly as stupid and trivial as it sounds that is a huge part of the reason that I like driving an electric car. I hate refueling. I don't know if you should get it then. Take the Taycan powertrain. But my argument is maybe not the thing that you might think it would be. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah, go for it.

Starting point is 03:34:58 We're going to get a massive delay. Sorry. And my reasoning is because of a comment that you made not even that long ago, when you had to drive your old Volt. Yeah, Volt, right? Yeah, Volt, you had to drive your old Volt again. And you're like, Yeah, I mean, it's really not that different. That's my reason why I don't think you should get it. The GR? Oh, the GR would be different.

Starting point is 03:35:20 Is it would it be would you actively actually enjoy it as a manual transmission oh okay yeah it's a three-cylinder manual tranny like super lightweight just that sounds fun like stupid would you track it um i mean he would track it for me you'd track it for him oh i mean oh god he'd probably he'd probably rent it. Can you drive me around? Can I go with you? You should buy the two. I'm getting a Type R, though. You're getting a Type R? Yeah, but I have two deposits.

Starting point is 03:35:51 Two deposits? Yeah. Are you going to scalp one so you can afford the other? No, it's just like... Yeah, okay, sure. I've been waiting for like a year and a half. I'm not going to judge you. I don't care.

Starting point is 03:36:00 Yeah. Final. Andy's going Type R. All right. Well, let's keep going because like we're actually late oh yeah yeah like a lot at lunch yeah oh yeah like people are flying out and stuff and the show's been on for almost four hours we need to okay yeah let's go okay uh if you guys want to go through potentials and respond to them i'll start reading the rest of the curated i'll go from a lot of them are stuck for you oh okay i'm sure with this taiwan trip you have gotten to eat some great food what are some standout foods or meals you have experienced in different countries uh by a long shot the best food i ever ate anywhere was on the Intel trip.

Starting point is 03:36:47 I couldn't believe how good the food was there. Taiwan is really great too, though. I just, man, I just love like, just like comfort food here. Just like beef noodle soup. We went for like really good beef noodle soup last night. It's just so good. Hi, Linus, Luke, and Dan. What has been the greatest challenge in your lifetimes to overcome and how did you overcome it?

Starting point is 03:37:08 Oh wow, I just replied to that one I think the obvious answer is kids man, it's raising kids is the most challenging and important thing I will ever do Are you doing curated or potential at the moment? Potentials, I'm going to start at the top of potentials

Starting point is 03:37:24 Okay Purated or potential at the moment? Potentials. I'm going to start at the top of potentials. Okay. Okay, that one must have come down and pushed it. I see. What a Computex do you wish you could make? What the hell is going on? There's duplicates. Hi, LLD.

Starting point is 03:37:42 With your ongoing goal of making a badminton court complex, what other sports centers or storefronts would you like to try and open i would like to see you open a pc or mobile phone repair shop oh that's very unlikely to happen i could see us doing i could see us doing like a gaming airbnb or like a gaming hotel but like in a more of like a western style. I could see I could see expanding the racket sport thing I could see adding like squash and racquetball, like tennis and like doing like, like a like a huge complex. And I'm assuming I have unlimited money for this, which I don't. It's just going to be badminton. And it's just going to be a small pro shop. But hey, if I'm imagining things, then that's that's what I would imagine.

Starting point is 03:38:23 pro shop. But hey, if I'm imagining things, then that's, that's what I would imagine. One of your rare 45 plus viewers, I retire in two and a half years and wonder if you would recommend a new career in tech at 50. And what would you point to? Well, we have a lot more 45 plus viewers than you would think. I can tell you that much already, just based on people who walk up to me at trade shows and on the street. As for a new career in tech, man, that's tough. Tech is always moving so fast. The best thing is to just, you know, keep your ear to the ground. And, you know, chase your passion, right? Like I, the billionaire that I was meeting with, I asked, you know, hey, well, you know, obviously, I could probably look this up. But, you know, I'd love to hear it from you instead, you know, what's your story. And I was just so impressed by how passionate he was about what he was doing. And I just I loved that. And it started with just trying to fix a simple problem, just identifying something that was a problem and building a solution for it that he was excited about. I thought that was so cool. And I think that's just a great approach for everybody, whether you make a dollar or a billion dollars,

Starting point is 03:39:36 if you can solve a problem, you're going to get satisfaction from it. And if you can solve a problem that a lot of people have, then, well, you're more likely to not make just a dollar. Gentlemen, and Linus, I'm picking up the ABC book for my soon-to-be niece, looking forward to indoctrinating her. Everyone asks about parenting tips,

Starting point is 03:39:59 but do you fellas have any uncle-ing tips? I don't know. I feel like it's pretty easy. You're more of an uncle than me. I literally am. I actually have a nephew and niece. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:40:15 I mean, you have the easy job, right? You get to swoop in when it's fun and hang out. And then when things suck, you get to leave. So it's like, I don't know. I haven't been one of kids that are old enough to really do a lot of the things that i think uncles would be best at doing um but the things that i'm prepared and excited to do is like be very present um like when when my brother's daughter grows up i'm sure she will be involved in some type of activity i don't know whether

Starting point is 03:40:47 it's a sport or something else but um i would like to to be there and support um yeah i don't know try to help with like um opportunity enablement as much as possible if if my brother and his wife are are busy try to help stuff like that i just treat my nephew and niece like i would my kids um i firmly believe that you know kids need structure and i think just being the fun uncle is not necessarily a good play i want to be the uh the uncle that gave them good advice and told them the right things and um you know checked them when they were, when they were doing something that was going to cause problems. Um,

Starting point is 03:41:30 yeah, I just, I just uncle exactly the same as I parent. That's true. I feel the same way about like dogs and stuff too. It's the same thing. I just, you're not going to be there all the time.

Starting point is 03:41:42 So I, I think something that gets lost on a lot of people in that situation is that the kids still value you being there, even though you're not their direct parents. So you shouldn't forget that and you should actually be there. And they like notice when you're not there. So, yeah. Linus, you've mentioned your socks before.

Starting point is 03:42:02 What are your favorite configs for your daily socks? I only wear one sock. Well, unless I'm trialing prototypes of the socks that we're trying to make. And they're just Darn Tough's regular crew sock. I actually was on their site the other day because someone asked me about this. And I didn't see the exact model that I have anymore. But they're they're just so good merino wool they're they're the reason that we haven't made a sock yet because

Starting point is 03:42:29 I can't beat them or match them if we can even get like 95 of the way there I'll consider that good enough but we can't yet last of mine curated hey dll how important is it for you to not be recognized in public when you just want to enjoy something else now you guys are famous uh greetings from germany i give up just yeah there's a there was a video that came out recently of some some dude streaming riding a bike um in norway or something and he he goes past uh magnus carlson who's sitting on a bench watching something on his phone and the guy asked for a selfie from magnus but magnus is like first of all tells him like sorry i don't want to be bothered right now and the guy talks to him anyways and then he goes could i like get a selfie with you after i watch this thing and the

Starting point is 03:43:24 guy's like no i'm in a hurry right now. I need it right now. And gets really pushy. And then Magnus like goes to take the photo with him. And then the guy asked for Magnus to stand up for the photo. And you can tell that Magnus is like really annoyed, but just doing it anyways. Like the dude's streaming this whole time. So now this interaction is on camera.

Starting point is 03:43:44 And it's just like oh man stuff like that's really rough i um i always prefer that people like say hi um because i i would always rather know that you recognize me than sit there and like wonder if people around me know who i am um but i know that's not true for everyone. It's going to be slightly different for everybody, which is like annoying, but it is what it is. So excited to get the 3D down jacket. Just in time for 90 degree Fahrenheit. Oh,

Starting point is 03:44:15 crap. I know what that sound is. Read this one. The alarm's going off. He's trying to get my attention. It is beeping uh sorry guys uh so excited for my 3d down jacket for 90 fahrenheit weather that's hot for the celsius folks out there i can't wait for the ltt bro tank in december uh linus what's the first home project you ever did and how did it go? I assume you mean when I moved into my place and I'm having a really hard time actually coming up with that. I think one of the first kind of home DIY things that I did was actually on video though. I ran an ethernet cable along the outside of the house to where the media PC is. And I had a contractor help me,

Starting point is 03:45:11 but I actually did do some of the work myself as well. And I made a video about it. For me, like networking is the first thing that needs to be improved in a house because typically it sucks i didn't did i do that much handy stuff yeah i guess i started doing it a lot later like i don't count you know painting the nursery when we had kids is that a is that a a home project yeah oh how did that how did they define it What's the first home project you ever did? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:45:47 That went well. I mean, I, I paint also painted the, um, all the furniture for the nursery painted it white. Uh, so we had this kind of fun kind of pastel yellow and white color scheme in

Starting point is 03:45:58 there. Um, man, it's amazing. The things you forget. Yeah, I'm going to go with that. I did that. Okay.

Starting point is 03:46:13 The police aren't on their way, thankfully. Let's see what we got here. Linus, assuming in your new position you will get a modicum of more free time, what kind of things are you going to pick up in this free time? More hosting, more coaching. I want to do more coaching for our hosts and our shooters and help make sure that everything we upload is LMGE. I hear that there are new firmware updates on the Ally. Have you noticed any improvements that others have not?

Starting point is 03:46:53 No. I can respond to this other one at the same time from Joshua as responding to how Tears of the Kingdom has been on the Allies so far. It's been, oh, I've got a couple of these. Raven also asked how is Tears of the Kingdom on the Ally. The performance I'm getting is not great right now, but I've got to be honest with you, the only time I had to play it was on the plane. And other than loading all the files onto it ahead of time, I didn't really research anything. So I was kind of trying to figure it out on my own on the plane. I tried to apply a 60 FPS mod,

Starting point is 03:47:28 and it seemed to make performance worse, though I wasn't really sure. Performance seemed lower than it should have been because Breath of the Wild runs amazing on it, and I wasn't really expecting Tears of the Kingdom performance to be that much lower than Breath of the Wild, given that they don't seem to work that different to me. I could have missed something, though.

Starting point is 03:47:50 And I'm not just talking like when it's compiling shape. This is really not working very well. I'm not just talking when it's compiling shaders. I mean just in general, performance seemed pretty rubbish, actually. And it would kind of start lagging more sometimes too so it hasn't been a great experience so far in tears of the kingdom but it ran breath of the wild great but I was using seen you for

Starting point is 03:48:15 breath of the wild and I'm using you zoo for tears of the kingdom and I'm new to use it I have spent almost no time with it I don it. I don't really know the ins and outs. So I forget what the original question was, but... No, I probably haven't noticed things that other people haven't yet because I haven't really had much time to game in the last couple of weeks. Archive. Hi, Linus. Do you carry any skills from your product manager days into your day-to-day life?

Starting point is 03:48:49 Absolutely. I mean, everything you do, every person you meet is an opportunity to learn. And I think that's something that I do a relatively good job of, is just keeping my eyes open and trying to understand better. I actually got some very high praise that made me really happy when we were working on our framework factory tour, which is coming. One of the higher ups at framework used to work in supply chain for Apple and said that when I did my original framework video explaining why a company needs investment and I started explaining how the supply chain works that I got it like 85 to 90 percent

Starting point is 03:49:33 right to the point and and like the parts that were like not that were not wrong they were just like maybe not as thorough um but she she's like super sharp and so you know whenever i whenever someone gives me praise i always consider the source so i appreciated her saying that because she seems like a shark um and uh she said yeah you got like 85 90 right and i'm kind of sitting here going how does anyone in the media have any business like knowing this much about supply chain because i've just never really seen that before 85, 90% right. And I'm kind of sitting here going, how does anyone in the media have any business like knowing this much about supply chain? Cause I've just never really seen that before. And yeah, it's just stuff that I've, that I picked up from my product management days and from just

Starting point is 03:50:14 kind of trying to pay attention, try to understand better. The intro for that video is really funny. I think I wrote it, but basically I I'm walking down the streets in Taipei and I go, you know, yeah. PlayStation fives, toilet paper, framework laptops. I want to buy one, but they, if it's not in stock, what's the deal with that? Why don't they just make more of them? And I have ample reason to be angry about the six. There's a six month wait right now for the amd version of the framework yeah that's pretty rough and so so i i have ample reason to be mad about this because aside from just waiting six months for my laptop i have a lot of money riding on them being able to deliver freaking product so why aren't they just making more since i'm in taiwan anyway i

Starting point is 03:51:02 thought i'm gonna knock on some doors and figure out what the heck's going on with my investment and then this is amazing and i'm sorry to kind of ruin the joke for you guys because it'll be really funny if you don't have it ruined but anyway um it cuts straight from there to me in this like shanty like back alley because when you search for framework they have an office here but when you search for framework on google maps it takes you to some it's labeled bicycle club but it seems to be like a bus repair garage oh or something and so i'm just standing and we actually went to the trouble to drive half an hour out of our way to go be at Framework Bicycle Club in Taiwan.

Starting point is 03:51:47 And I'm like, there's a bicycle club. Did I just get played? And then it hard cuts to the Compile factory where frameworks are made and gets into the Framework tour, which is going to be really, really exciting. I've never been in a laptop manufacturing facility. I don't think Compile has ever done anything like that before. It's going to be really really exciting I've never been in a laptop manufacturing facility I don't think Compile's ever done anything like that before it's going to be really cool and I think that's it for the WAN show we'll see you again next week same bad

Starting point is 03:52:14 time same bad channel bye well different times as an earlier time yeah Thanks for watching!

The WAN Show - It's Time To Name And Shame - WAN Show June 2, 2023

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